"To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking." ~Agnes De Milles

"If you can talk, you can sing. If you can walk, you can dance." ~African Proverb

"Any problem in the world can be solved by dancing." ~James Brown

"To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love." ~Jane Austen

"A good education consists in knowing how to sing and dance well." ~Plato, Laws

"Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing." ~Friedric Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The way people move is their autobiography in motion." ~Gerry Spence

"Dance with all the might of your body, and with 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 on the Art of Fascinating (1858)

"The Dancer believes that his art has something to say which cannot be expressed in words or in any other way than by dancing... there are times when the simple dignity of movement can fulfill the function of a volume of words. There are movements which impinge upon the nerves with a strength that is incomparable, for movement has power to stir the senses and emotions, unique in itself. This is the dancer's justification for being, and his reason for searching further for deeper aspects of his art." ~Doris Humphrey, 1937

"Dancers work and live from the inside. They drive themselves constantly producing a glow that lights not only themselves but audience after audience." ~Murray Louis

"I see dance being used as communication between body and soul, to express what it too deep to find for words." ~Ruth St. Denis

"Dance is your pulse, your heartbeat, your breathing. It's the rhythm of your life. It's the expression in time and movement, in happiness, joy, sadness and envy." ~Jaques D'ambroise

"The 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

"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

"Great dancers are not great because of their technique; they are great because of their passion." ~Martha Graham

"I should not believe in a God who does not dance." ~Friedric Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays." ~George Balanchine

"You don't stop dancing by growing old, you grow old by stopping to dance." ~Unknown

"Fine dancing, I believe, like virtue, must be its own reward. Those who are standing by are usually thinking of something very different. " ~Jane Austen

"Learning to walk sets you free. Learning to dance gives you the greatest freedom of all: to express your whole self, the person you are. " ~Melissa Hayden

"Dancing is the poetry of the foot. " ~John Dryden

"Let us read and let us dance: two amusements that will never do any harm to the world. " ~Voltaire

"I don't want people who want to dance, I want people who *have* to dance. " ~George Balanchine

"Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policeman: always alert, always tense; but see, policeman don't have to be beautiful at the same time. " ~George Balanchine

"Dance is a little insanity that does us all a lot of good." ~Edward Demby