Dancing Quotes

When we were at school we were taught to sing the songs of the Europeans. How many of us were taught the songs of the Wanyamwezi or of the Wahehe? Many of us have learnt to dance the rumba, or the cha cha, to rock and roll and to twist and even to dance the waltz and foxtrot. But how many of us can dance, or have even heard of the gombe sugu, the mangala, nyang umumi, kiduo, or lele mama?

Julius Kambarge Nyerere

To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.

David Byrne

Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels.

Faith Whittlesey

They seldom looked happy. They passed one another without a word in the elevator, like silent shades in hell, hell-bent on their next look from a handsome stranger. Their next rush from a popper. The next song that turned their bones to jelly and left them all on the dance floor with heads back, eyes nearly closed, in the ecstasy of saints receiving the stigmata.

Andrew Holleran

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sakes. Now, I mean, I'm talking about singing in the shower, I'm talking about dancing to the radio, I'm talking about writing a poem to a friend--a lousy poem.

Kurt Vonnegut

And we love to dance -- especially that new one called the Civil War Twist. The Northern part of you stands still while the Southern part tries to secede.

Dick Gregory

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

Isadora Duncan

He makes a swan-like end, fading in music.

William Shakespeare

How inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Don't worry about the war. It's all over but the shooting.

Samuel Goldwyn

Nothing is more revealing than movement.

Martha Graham

We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.

Martha Graham

Great dancers are not great because of their technique; they are great because of their passion.

Martha Graham

There comes a pause, for human strength will not endure to dance without cessation; and everyone must reach the point at length of absolute prostration.

Lewis Carroll

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.

Havelock Ellis

Human beings used to be molecules which could do many, many different sorts of dances, or decline to dance at all --as they pleased. My mother could do the waltz, the tango, the rumba....

Kurt Vonnegut

And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Kahlil Gibran

You need to get in touch with your body ... do dance, movement, learn to be supple, or be someone who's coordinated, preferably. You have to study, train, and you don't have to go to school necessarily, you can teach yourself a lot of stuff.

Jacqueline Bisset, Interview on

It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively, without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind;-- but when a beginning is made-- when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt-- it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more.

Jane Austen