Love teaches even asses to dance.
— French proverb
The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.
- Isadora Duncan
Think of the magic of that foot, comparatively small,
upon which your whole weight rests. It's a miracle,
and the dance . . . is a celebration of that miracle.
- Martha Graham
Life is like dancing. If we have a big floor, many people
will dance. Some will get angry when the rhythm changes. But life is changing all the time.
— Miguel Angel Ruiz
Dancing begets warmth, which is the parent of wantonness. It is, Sir, the great grandfather
of cuckoldom.
- Henry Fielding
To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.
- David Byrne
Please send me your last pair of shoes, worn out with dancing as you mentioned in your
letter, so that I might have something to press against my heart.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Dancing with abandon, turning a tango into a fertility rite.
- Marshall Pugh (b. 1925), British journalist, author,
The Chancer
She [Pamela Anderson] is a great dancer considering she can't
see her feet.
- David Letterman
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."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
How inimitably graceful children are in general before they
learn to dance!
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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.
- Jane Austen
On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.
- Lord Byron
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.
- Lewis Carroll
Drink, and dance and laugh and lie,
Love the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)
- Dorothy Parker
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.
- Andrew Holleran (b. 1943), U.S. journalist, author. Dancer
from the Dance, ch. 2 (1978), of club regulars.
Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and
dance.
- Dave Barry
Dancing is like dreaming with your feet!
- Constanze
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.
- Martha Graham
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?
- Julius K. Nyerere, Tanzanian president
Music and dancing (the more's the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of
riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can
hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great
change of ideas must take place.
- Sir John Herschel
The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it
departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this
must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are
never too far from physical movement.
- Ezra Pound
And thus they give the time, that Nature
meant
For peaceful sleep and meditative snores,
To ceaseless din and mindless merriment
And waste of shoes and floors.
- Lewis Carroll (1832-98), English author, mathematician.
Four Riddles, no. 1 (first published 1869; rep
There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good.
-Edwin Denby
The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music. Bodies never
lie.
- Agnes de Mille
Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays..
- George Balanchine
There are short-cuts to happiness, and dancing is one of
them.
- Vicki Baum