Quotes from Isadora Duncan

People do not live nowadays. They get about 10% out of life.

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

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

Virtuous people are simply those who have not been tempted sufficiently, because they live in a vegetative state, or because their purposes are so concentrated in one direction that they have not had the leisure to glance around them.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Now I am going to reveal to you something which is very pure, a totally white thought. It is always in my heart; it blooms at each of my steps... The Dance is love, it is only love, it alone, and that is enough... I, then, it is amorously that I dance: to poems, to music but now I would like to no longer dance to anything but the rhythm of my soul.

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.

Oh Woman, come before us, before our eyes longing for beauty, and tired of the ugliness of civilization, come in simple tunics, letting us see the line and harmony of the body beneath, and dance for us. Dance us the sweetness of life. Give us again the sweetness and the beauty of the true dance, give us again the joy of seeing the simple unconscious pure body of a woman. Like a great call it has come, and women must hear it and answer it.

Movements are as eloquent as words.

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.

These people seemed so enwrapped in snobbishness and the glory of being rich that they had no art sense whatever.

Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire. Farewell my friends. I go to glory. Isadora Duncan's last words before her scarf caught in a car wheel, breaking her neck.

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

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.

La danza è l'eterno risorgere del Sole.

Don't let them tame you.

With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.

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