Isadora Duncan Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

The finest inheritance you can give to a child is to allow it to make its own way, completely on its own feet.

Isadora Duncan
I intend to work for this dance of the future. I do not know whether I have the necessary qualities; I may have neither genius nor talent nor temperament. But I know that I have a Will; and will and energy sometimes prove greater than either genius or talent or temperament.

Isadora Duncan
There are joys so complete, so all perfect, that one should not survive them.

Isadora Duncan
So that ends my first experience with matrimony, which I always thought a highly overrated performance.

Isadora Duncan
It is the mission of all art to express the highest and most beautiful ideals of man.

Isadora Duncan
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.

Isadora Duncan
A woman who has known but one man is like a person who has heard only one composer.

Isadora Duncan
To express what is the most moral, healthful and beautiful in art this is the mission of the dancer, and to this I dedicate my life.

Isadora Duncan
I could not adopt him so I married him. You know how wonderful he is, like all Russians. He starts reciting verse at two o'clock in the morning.

Isadora Duncan
I hope that schools have changed since I was a little girl. My memory of the teaching of the public schools is that it showed the brutal incomprehension of children.

Isadora Duncan
I have only danced my life. As a child I danced the spontaneous joy of growing things. As an adolescent, I danced with joy turning to apprehension of the first realisation of tragic undercurrents; apprehension of the pitiless brutality and crushing progress of life.

Isadora Duncan
No composer has yet caught this rhythm of America — it is too mighty for the ears of most.

Isadora Duncan
The butcher with his bloody apron incites bloodshed, murder. Why not? From cutting the throat of a young calf to cutting the throat of our brothers and sisters is but a step. While we are ourselves the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal conditions on the earth?

Isadora Duncan
The dance of the future will have to become again a high religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is not art. It is mere merchandise.

Isadora Duncan
The harmony of music exists equally with the harmony of movement in nature.

Isadora Duncan
Any woman or man who would write the truth of their lives would write a great work. But no one has dared to write the truth of their lives.

Isadora Duncan
For I was never able to understand, then or later on, why, if one wanted to do a thing, one should not do it. For I have never waited to do as I wished. This has frequently brought me to disaster and calamity, but at least I have the satisfaction of getting my own way.

Isadora Duncan
Oh, she is coming, the dancer of the future... more glorious than any woman who has yet been: more beautiful than the Egyptian, than the early Italian, than all women of past centuries—the highest intelligence in the freest body!

Isadora Duncan
I see only the ideal. But no ideals have ever been fully successful on this earth.

Isadora Duncan
I was born by the sea, and I have noticed that all the great events of my life have taken place by the sea. My first idea of movement, of the dance, certainly came from the rhythm of the waves.

Isadora Duncan
So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.

Isadora Duncan
Love is not the sacred thing that poets talk about … Love is an illusion; it is the world's greatest mistake. I ought to know for I've been loved as no other woman of my time has been loved. Men have threatened suicide, they have taken poison, they have fought duels for me. All kinds have come to me — geniuses, poets, millionaires, artists, musicians — but now there is not one to whom I have appealed for the loan of £25 who have responded.
There is love for you!

Isadora Duncan
Man has not invented the harmony of music. It is one of the underlying principles of life.

Isadora Duncan
It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

Isadora Duncan
I have closely studied the figured documents of all ages and of all the great masters, but I have never seen in them any representations of human beings walking on the extremity of the toes or raising the leg higher than the head. These ugly and false positions in no way express that state of unconscious Dionysiac delirium which is necessary to the dancer. Moreover movèments, just like harmonies in music, are not invented; they are discovered.

Isadora Duncan
The movement of the waves, of winds, of the earth is ever in the same lasting harmony. We do not stand on the beach and inquire of the ocean what was its movement of the past and what will be its movement of the future. We realize that the movement peculiar to its nature is eternal to its nature. The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body.

Isadora Duncan
I wonder how many parents realize that by the so-called education they are giving their children, they are only driving them into the commonplace, and depriving them of any chance of doing anything beautiful or original.

Isadora Duncan
My Art is just an effort to express the truth of my Being in gesture and movement. It has taken me long years to find even one absolutely true movement.

Isadora Duncan
The whole world is absolutely brought up on lies. We are fed nothing but lies. We begin with lies, and half our lives we live with lies. Most human beings waste some twenty-five to thirty years of their lives before they break through the actual and conventional lies which surround them.

Isadora Duncan
I preach freedom of the mind through freedom of the body; women, for example — out of the prison of corsets.

Isadora Duncan