Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Isadora Duncan (American Dancer)

Isadora Duncan (1877–1927,) originally Angela Duncan, was an American dancer and choreographer who achieved fame in Europe for her emotional, expressive style. A pioneer of modern dance, she developed a new form of fluid barefoot dancing derived from classical Greek art.

Born in San Francisco, California, Duncan traveled throughout Europe, performing her choreography, and founded schools in Berlin, Salzburg, and Vienna.

Duncan’s dance style was inspired by the movements of waves and trees, by ancient Greek-inspired notions of beauty and harmony, and the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Havelock Ellis. Her dance consisted of simple flowing movements of the body—running, skipping, and walking—which for her expressed the rhythms of nature and graceful human sentiments. Her interpretative dancing was particularly influential in the development of modern ballet.

Duncan’s life had been filled with controversy and tragedy. She held progressive views on marriage and women’s liberation. She was flat broke, lost three children; her husband, the poet Sergei Yesenin, committed suicide. Duncan was accidentally strangulated when her scarf caught in the wheel of the open sports car in which she was traveling.

Duncan’s autobiography, My Life (1926–27,) is noted for its frank revelations of an eventful career. Her diverse writings and talks were collected as Isadora Speaks (1981.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by 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
Topics: Jazz

The dancer’s body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul.
—Isadora Duncan
Topics: Dance, Dancing, Body

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
Topics: Writing

With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.
—Isadora Duncan
Topics: Mothers

Before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and champagne. If people ask me when I began to dance, I reply, In my mother’s womb, probably as a result of the oysters and champagne – the food of Aphrodite.
—Isadora Duncan
Topics: Wine, Dance, Dancing

People do not live nowadays. They get about 10% out of life.
—Isadora Duncan
Topics: Life and Living

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
Topics: Lawyers, Law

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.
—Isadora Duncan
Topics: Virtue

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.
—Isadora Duncan
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers

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
Topics: Dancing, Dance

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
Topics: Inheritance, Children

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

The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.
—Isadora Duncan
Topics: Dancing, Dance

I had learned to have a perfect nausea for the theatre: the continual repetition of the same words and the same gestures, night after night, and the caprices, the way of looking at life, and the entire rigmarole disgusted me.
—Isadora Duncan
Topics: Theater

So that ends my first experience of matrimony, which I always thought a highly over-rated performance.
—Isadora Duncan
Topics: Marriage

Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.
—Isadora Duncan
Topics: Marriage

Perhaps he was a bit different from other people, but what really sympathetic person is not a little mad?
—Isadora Duncan
Topics: Madness

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
Topics: Love

What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print.
—Isadora Duncan
Topics: Experience

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