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Quotations about Dancing
They who dance
Find infinite gold floors
Beneath their feet.
~Marjorie Allen Seiffert, "Sequence," A Woman of Thirty, 1919
There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good. It has been doing people good for a long time. ~Edwin Denby, "Forms in Motion and in Thought," 1954–1965
Kids:
They dance before they learn
there is anything that isn't music.
~William Stafford, "Keepsakes," c.1950s
I could believe only in a God who would know how to dance. ~Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), "Of Reading and Writing," Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, translated from the German by Alexander Tille, 1896
How much more magnificent if thousands and thousands of people should burst out of the office buildings in the middle of the afternoon and go into City Hall Park or the Battery and dance folk dances. Marvelous! That would be real sport... I started folk dancing in the offices of the Evening Post years ago. I very nearly lost my job because they thought I was crazy. That was my idea of real fun — to get the office staff out in St. Paul's graveyard and do a little folk dance. That is perfect... Just go dance in the streets. ~Christopher Morley (1890–1957)
There are short-cuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them. ~Vicki Baum (1888–1960)
The stars are aflare and the moon is white,
And the wind blows over the grass!
Light is my youth and my feet are light,
And swift are the years that pass.
Come, all maidens, and bind your hands
About your heads of gold.
Swiften your feet and trip the sands
Before the world grows old...
Come, while the life of you lifts in the day,
And laughter through you slips.
Supple and sweet is the leaping clay,
From the feet to the fingertips!...
A shadow lurks in the Milky Way,
And behind the moon is Death.
Dance, oh dance, till the night is grey,
And the dew is a shuddering breath!...
~Julia Cooley Altrocchi (1893–1972), "Dance of Youth," The Dance of Youth and Other Poems, 1917
Dancing begins at the feet and progresses upwards. In some people it stops at the ankles... In others it reaches as far as to the hips... But the dancer who dances to the tips of her fingers and the top of her head: that is the perfect dancer; for dancing being a sort of pulsation of grace in the limbs which dance, the perfect dancer is all grace; and if she has, to boot, a touch of tragic passion in her, it will find instant and vivid expression in her dancing... she is the rarest of rare birds. ~Bernard Shaw, 1890
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
~W. B. Yeats, "Among School Children"
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
~W. H. Auden, "Death's Echo," 1936
"What do you dance?" When a man belonging to one branch of the great Bantu division of mankind met a member of another, said Livingstone, that was the question he asked. What a man danced, that was his tribe, his social customs, his religion; for, as an anthropologist has put it, "a savage does not preach his religion, he dances it." ~Havelock Ellis, "The Art of Dancing," The Dance of Life, 1923
Stifling an urge to dance is bad for your health — it rusts your spirit and your hips. ~Terri Guillemets
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, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 1812
The sun's dancing so why shouldn't we? ~Frances Frost, Maple Sugar for Windy Foot, 1950
My soul is a dancer—
A dancer under shimmering willows in the sunlight.
The wind draws a bow across his violin.
He plays a scherzo—
Rippling notes on strings of silver.
Play faster, wind!
My feet are more swift than the leaves of the willow—
Shimmering, shimmering—
Amber shadows in the sunlight.
My feet are more swift than the laughter of waters.
Play faster, wind!
~Ellen Margaret Janson, "Scherzo," c.1921
From this point of view we may better understand the immense ardour with which every part of the wonderful human body has been brought into the play of the dance. The men and women of races spread all over the world have shown a marvellous skill and patience in imparting rhythm and measure to the most unlikely, the most rebellious regions of the body, all wrought by desire into potent and dazzling images. ~Havelock Ellis, "The Art of Dancing," The Dance of Life, 1923
...music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... ~Ezra Pound
God's in me when I dance
God, making Spring
Out of his thoughts
And building worlds
By wishing.
God
Laughing at his own
Queer fancies,
Standing awed,
And sobbing;
Musing,
Dreaming,
Throbbing;
Commanding;
Creating —
God's in me
When I dance.
~Mary Carolyn Davies, "Dance," Youth Riding, 1919
He dances like an Angel. ~Joseph Addison
Now shall I dance,
Or sit for dreams?
"Sit," answers Joy;
"Dance," Pleasure screams.
~W. H. Davies, "The Best Friend," Bird of Paradise, 1914
If life is good, don't just sit there — dance! If life's not so good — dance even more. ~Terri Guillemets
The truest expression of a people is in its dances and in its music. Bodies never lie. ~Agnes de Mille, 1975
I care not a job about the technology of the art of dancing... All that concerns me is how beautifully or how expressively a dancer can dance... ~Bernard Shaw, 1890
Danced as light as a wave-caught moon... ~Edwin Markham, "The Shoes of Happiness," The Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems, 1913
For 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. It is the only art, as Rahel Varnhagen said, of which we ourselves are the stuff. ~Havelock Ellis, "The Art of Dancing," The Dance of Life, 1923
I can dance such steps the very fairies marvel, and the Lady Moon forgets her path across the skyway as she waits to watch. ~Charles Buxton Going,
Dancing as an art, we may be sure, cannot die out, but will always be undergoing a rebirth. ~Havelock Ellis, "The Art of Dancing," The Dance of Life, 1923
Dancing is moving to the music without stepping on anyone's toes, pretty much the same as life. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
[T]he magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. ~D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), Apocalypse
Three little, merry little, piggy-wiggy-wigs,
Danced three jolly little jiggy-jiggy-jigs...
~Margaret Sidney, "The Three Little Pigs," 1882
To dance is to take part in the cosmic control of the world. ~Havelock Ellis, "The Art of Dancing," The Dance of Life, 1923
They who love dancing too much seem to have more brains in their feet than in their head. ~Terence
'Tis well; desire 'em
They would leave out the Words, and fall to Dancing;
The Poetry of the Foot takes most of late.
~John Dryden, The Rival-Ladies, 1664
For, truth to tell, dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen... ~Friedrich Nietzsche
Dance, dance, playfellows and lovers...
Youth is slipping, slipping, pearl on pearl, away.
~Louise Imogen Guiney (1861–1920), "Youth: Recitative and Scherzo"
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 (1749–1832)
And now the Chapel's silver bell you hear,
That summons you to all the Pride of Pray'r:
Light quirks of Music, broken and uneven,
Make the soul dance upon a Jig to Heav'n.
~Alexander Pope
Optimist: someone who figures that taking a step backward after taking a step forward is not a disaster, it's a cha-cha. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Can't stop dancing or I'll die...
Can't stop dancing till I fall...
~Audrey Wurdemann, "Tarantella," The House of Silk, 1927
Dance, to be beautiful forever. ~Terri Guillemets, "Glory moves," 2018, blackout poetry created from Danielle Steel, Fairy Tale, 2017, page 93
Even if you make a mistake, make it part of the dance and move on.
We take a step, then we stumble. The joy in life comes when we make a dance out of both.
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