Dance Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

However much the right hon. gentleman may dance around the ring beforehand, at some point, he will come within the reach of a big clunking fist.

My people had used music to soothe slavery's torment or to propitiate God, or to describe the sweetness of love and the distress of lovelessness, but I knew no race could sing and dance its way to freedom.

Girls forbidden to dance would only attract husbands with bad complexions and sunken chests.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Someone's sent a loving note in lines of returning geese and as the moon fills my western chamber as petals dance over the flowing stream again I think of you the two of us living a sadness apart a hurt that can't be removed yet when my gaze comes down my heart stays up

Orson Scott Card

Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't, maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't, maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary…what ever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either – your choices are half chance, so are everybody else's.

But if politics is an art, it is not like sculpture or painting, where one side acts and the other is passive material. It is more like drama without a script, or dance without choreography - in other words, improvisation. Either player may surprise us again with a new move.

Thomas Flanagan

I've been told my old city possesses a 'thriving arts scene,' whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks.

We live in a changing world: man is whispering through space, soaring to the stars in ships, flinging miles of steel and glass into the air. Shall the theater continue to huddle in the confines of a painted box set? The movies, in their kaleidoscopic speed and juxtaposition of external objects and internal emotions are seeking to find visible and audible expression for the tempo and psychology of our time. The stage too must experiment— with ideas, with psychological relationships of men and women, with speech and rhythm forms, with dance and movement, with color and light—or it must and should become a museum product.

Hallie Flanagan

String theory has the potential to show that all of the wondrous happenings in the universe - from the frantic dance of subatomic quarks to the stately waltz of orbiting binary stars; from the primordial fireball of the big bang to the majestic swirl of heavenly galaxies - are reflections of one, grand physical principle, one master equation.

'Twas easy following where invention trod
— All eyes can see when light flows out from God.
And thus did Jubal to his race reveal
Music their larger soul, where woe and weal
Filling the resonant chords, the song, the dance,
Moved with a wider-winged utterance.

The country is suffering from musical-chairs syndrome. We all dance around for a bit and then when we try to sit down again, somebody doesn't have a chair. We're running scared; we want ours.

In the village where I live, in Sussex, we made our bonfire in the Vicarage paddock and every year, as soon as it was lit, the Vicar's cow would begin to dance. She danced while the flames rose up to the sky, she danced till the ashes were black and cold. And the next morning — it was always the same — the Vicar would have no milk for his breakfast. It is strange to think of a simple cow rejoicing at the saving of Parliament so many years ago.

Yesterday was an utter waste. An artist, of whatever stripe, has only so many days, to write or paint or dance or whatever, and each one wasted is that much that will never be accomplished.

Caitlín R. Kiernan

we dance even if there's no radio. we drink at funerals. we talk too much & laugh too loud & live too large, and, frankly, we're suspicious of others who don't.

I should be able to get the alligators to dance to the tune of the pan pipe.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

On being praised for his performance in the play "The Dance of Death" about misery of marriage:

It wasn't difficult. There isn't a line that I haven't said to one of my three wives.

Laurence Olivier

Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart.

Religious ritual survives cultural transmission by embedding episodes of intense, life-defining personal experiences in public performances. These performances involve sequential, socially interactive movement and gesture (chant, dance, murmur, sway) and formulaic utterances that rhythmically synchronize affective states among group members in displays of cooperative commitment. This is often accompanied by sensory pageantry, which further helps to emotionally validate and sustain the moral consensus.

Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.

A daughter of a King of Ireland, heard A voice singing on a May Eve like this, And followed half awake and half asleep, Until she came into the Land of Faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue. And she is still there, busied with a dance Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood, Or where stars walk upon a mountain-top.

William Butler Yeats

The dance, just as the performance of the actor, is kinesthetic art, art of the muscle sense. The awareness of tension and relaxation within his own body, the sense of balance that distinguishes the proud stability of the vertical from the risky adventures of thrusting and falling—these are the tools of the dancer.

We have sought for firm ground and found none.
The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe; all is rushing about and vibrating in a wild dance.

They who dance
Find infinite golden floors
Beneath their feet.

Marjorie Allen Seiffert

Still ours the dance, the feast, the glorious Psalm, The mystic lights of emblem, and the Word.

May all your expectations be frustrated, may all your plans be thwarted, may all your desires be withered into nothingness, that you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God who is the Father, Son and Spirit.

Brennan Manning