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2) If you can talk, you can sing. If you can walk, you can dance. - -African Proverb
3) Any problem in the world can be solved by dancing. -- James Brown
4) To dance is to affirm. -- Bayard Coll
5) True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
-- Alexander Pope, "Essay on Criticism"
6) O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
-- William Butler Yeats, "Among School Children"
7) Dance is a sort of silent rhetoric. -- Canon Thoinot Arbeau
8) What do you dance? -- Bantu greeting to a member of another Bantu tribe
9) The aesthetic pleasure of dance is a secondary reflection of the primary, vital joy of courtship. -- Havelock Ellis
10) To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love. -- Jane Austen
11) One may judge a king by the state of dancing during his reign. -- Chinese proverb
11A) “A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.”
"To recite poetry is to enter into a verbal dance."
— Paul Valéry
12) A good education consists in knowing how to sing and dance well.-- Plato, Laws
13) Dancing is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff.-- Rahel Varnhagen
13A) Dancing is a means by which the body emulates the soul. -- Deirdre Priddin
14) Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing. -- Nietzsche
15) A dignified and formal dance is a delicately planned geometry. -- Ruth Katz
Pécour choreographic notation, 1712
Man's dance shoe, Baroque era
16) The dance is the mother of all languages. -- R.G. Collingwood
17) The way people move is their autobiography in motion. -- Gerry Spence
18) Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays. -- George Balanchine
19) Dancers are the athletes of God. -- Albert Einstein
20) No sane man will dance. -- Cicero
21) Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music. -- George Carlin (and others; original authorship not known)
22) Dance with all the might of your body, and all the fire of your soul, in order that you may shake all melancholy out of your liver; and you need not restrain yourself with the apprehension that any lady will have the least fear that the violence of your movements will ever shake anything out of your brains. -- Lola Montez, "Hints to Gentlemen or the Art of Fascinating" (1858)
23) When you dance, you don't sweat: you glow. -- Didi
24) Music is an invisible dance, as dancing is silent music. -- Anonymous
25) If the dance is right, there shouldn't be a single superfluous movement. -- Fred Astaire
26) Dance like no one is watching you. -- Anonymous
27) Lightness of movement is the cardinal demand one has to make on a dancer. -- Frank Thiess
28) All dancing girls are nineteen years old. -- Japanese proverb
29) The mirror is not you. The mirror is you looking at yourself. -- George Balanchine
30 Whenever you dance remember you should feel as though you are in love with your partner, even if you have just met him. -- Megata Tsunumi
31) Everyone has seen people dancing all night. But take a man and make him dance for a quarter of an hour without music and see if he can bear it.
-- Maurice de Saxe
32) After I stopped dancing, I was unable to listen to beautiful music. -- Suzanne Farrell
33) How inimitably graceful children are before they learn to dance. -- S.T. Coleridge
34) Never criticize your dance partner. -- Brave Combo
35) The dance is an appearance; if you like, an apparition. It springs from what the dancers do, yet it is something else. In watching a dance, you do not see what is physically before you – people running around or twisting their bodies; what you see is a display of interacting forces by which the dance seems to be lifted, driven, drawn, closed, or attenuated… The forces we seem to perceive most directly and convincingly are created for our perception; and they exist only for it. -- Susanne Langer
If you don't have time to watch the whole "Pas de Deux" video, drag the bar about 2/3 of the way and see McLaren's rendering of the fourth dimension of dance.
36) What does it mean to express one’s ideas of some inward of “subjective” process? It means to make an outward image of this inward process, for oneself and others to see; that is, to give the subjective events an objective symbol. Every work of art is such an image, whether it be a dance, a statue, a picture, a piece of music, or a work of poetry. -- Susanne Langer
37) "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." -- Duke Ellington
38) The forms of tango are like stages of a marriage:
The American tango is like the beginning of a love affair, when you're both very romantic and on your best behavior.
The Argentine tango is when you're in the heat of things and all kinds of emotions are flying: passion, anger, humor.
The International tango is like the end of the marriage, when you're staying together for the sake of the children.
-- Barbara Garvey
39) David Foster Wallace on Clogging at an Illinois State Fair
An early (1960s?) home video of clogging at home
40) DANCE IS THE MOTHER OF ALL LANGUAGES
"Speech is after all only a system of gestures, having the peculiarity that each gesture produces a characteristic sound, so that it can be perceived through the ear as well as through the eye. Listening to a speaker instead of looking at him tends to make us think of speech as essentially a system of sounds; but it is not; essentially it is a system of gestures made with the lungs and larynx, and the cavities of the mouth and nose. We get still further away from the fundamental facts about speech when we think of it as something that can be written and read, forgetting that writing, in our clumsy notations, can represent only a small part of the spoken sound, where pitch, stress, tempo and rhythm, are almost entirely ignored... Every language in this way a specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that the dance is the mother of all languages."
-- R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art
41) GEORGE WASHINGTON ON DANCE
"Alas! our dancing days are no more."
George Washington on the Value of Dance
I thought that visitors to this site might like to see a poignant expression of George Washington's love of dance. In a letter dated Nov 12, 1799, to the Assembly in Alexandria, declining their invitation to be a member of the club, he says:
