Quotes from 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.

Others loved themselves, money, theories, power: Lenin loved his fellow men.... Lenin was God, as Christ was God, because God is Love and Christ and Lenin were all Love!

If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it

Let us first teach little children to breathe, to vibrate, to feel, and to become one with the general harmony and movement of nature. Let us first produce a beautiful human being, a dancing child.

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.

The dancer will not belong to a nation but to all humanity.

Most human beings today waste some 25 to 30 years of their lives before they break through the actual and conventional lies which surround them.

Perhaps he was a bit different from other people, but what really sympathetic person is not a little mad?

Dancing: The Highest Intelligence in the Freest Body.

I do not teach children, I give them joy.

You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you.

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.

All my life I have struggled to make one authentic gesture.

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

What I am interested in doing is finding and expressing a new form of life

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.

It is only in romances that people undergo a sudden metamorphosis. In real life, even after the most terrible experiences, the main character remains exactly the same.

The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.

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.

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

The dancer of the future will be one whose body & soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of the soul will have become the movement of the body.

I would rather live in Russia on black bread and vodka than in the United States at the best hotels. America knows nothing of food, love or art.

America knows nothing of food, love, or art.

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.