Isadora Duncan quotes

Isadora Duncan was an American dancer and choreographer, regarded as a pioneer of modern dance. Her expressive style broke away from traditional ballet and emphasized natural movement and personal freedom. She inspired generations of artists and remains an enduring icon of creativity. Here are 39 of her quotes:

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

The dancer's body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul.

Isadora Duncan

Art is not necessary at all. All that is necessary to make this world a better place to live in is to love - to love as Christ loved, as Buddha loved.

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

Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print.

Isadora Duncan

With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.

Isadora Duncan

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

So that ends my first experience of matrimony, which I always thought a highly over-rated performance.

Isadora Duncan

It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.

Isadora Duncan

We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity.

Isadora Duncan

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Isadora Duncan

Bernard Shaw says that as long as men torture and slay animals and eat their flesh we shall have war. I think all sane, thinking people must be of his opinion. The children of my school were all vegetarians, and grew strong and beautiful on a vegetable and fruit diet. Sometimes during the war when I heard the cries of the wounded I thought of the cries of the animals in the slaughterhouse, and I felt that, as we torture these poor defenceless creatures, so the gods torture us. Who loves this horrible thing called war? Probably the meat-eaters, having killed, feel the need to kill-kill birds, animals-the tender stricken deer-hunt foxes. 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

People don't live nowadays: they get about ten percent out of life.

Isadora Duncan

The wind? I am the wind. The sea and the moon? I am the sea and the moon. Tears, pain, love, bird-flights? I am all of them. I dance what I am. Sin, prayer, flight, the light that never was on land or sea? I dance what I am.

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