26 quotes about Dance and Dancing

I just put my feet in the air and move them around.

Astaire, Fred

It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind; but when a beginning is made -- when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt -- it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more.

Austen, Jane

I am not the first straight dancer or the last.

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.

Byrne, David

There comes a pause, for human strength will not endure to dance without cessation; and everyone must reach the point at length of absolute prostration.

Carroll, Lewis

Custom has made dancing sometimes necessary for a young man; therefore mind it while you learn it, that you may learn to do it well, and not be ridiculous, though in a ridiculous act.

Chesterfield, Lord

The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.

Cleaver, Eldridge

How inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance!

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.

Duncan, Isadora

The real American type can never be a ballet dancer. The legs are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too free for this school of affected grace and toe walking.

Duncan, Isadora

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.

Ellis, Havelock

Dancing begets warmth, which is the parent of wantonness. It is, Sir, the great grandfather of cuckoldom.

Fielding, Henry

And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Gibran, Kahlil

Great dancers are not great because of their technique; they are great because of their passion.

Graham, Martha

We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.

Graham, Martha

Nothing is more revealing than movement.

Graham, Martha

And we love to dance -- especially that new one called the Civil War Twist. The Northern part of you stands still while the Southern part tries to secede.

Gregory, Dick

They seldom looked happy. They passed one another without a word in the elevator, like silent shades in hell, hell-bent on their next look from a handsome stranger. Their next rush from a popper. The next song that turned their bones to jelly and left them all on the dance floor with heads back, eyes nearly closed, in the ecstasy of saints receiving the stigmata.

Holleran, Andrew

Dancing is a wonderful training for girls, it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.

Morley, Christopher

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his divine service.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

We should consider every day lost in which we have not danced at least once.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

When we were at school we were taught to sing the songs of the Europeans. How many of us were taught the songs of the Wanyamwezi or of the Wahehe? Many of us have learnt to dance the rumba, or the cha cha, to rock and roll and to twist and even to dance the waltz and foxtrot. But how many of us can dance, or have even heard of the gombe sugu, the mangala, nyang umumi, kiduo, or lele mama?

Nyerere, Julius Kambarge

Dancing with abandon, turning a tango into a fertility rite.

Pugh, Marshall

A perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

Shaw, George Bernard

On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there's any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

Twain, Mark

Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels.

Whittlesey, Faith