This is a thread dedicated to affirmation and thoughts for dancers that we are starting to collect. Please feel free to add ...

"There are short-cuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them." ~Vicki Baum

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

"Dancers are the athletes of God." ~Albert Einstein

"Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order." ~Samuel Beckett

"How can we know the dancer from the dance?" ~William Butler Yeats

"The key to tango is to enjoy your dance." -- unknown

"The key to tango is how well your partner enjoys the dance." -- unknown

"I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance." ~Friedrich Nietzsche

"Never trust spiritual leader who cannot dance." ~Mr. Miyagi, The Next Karate Kid, 1994

"Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance." ~Dave Barry

"Dancing is wonderful training for girls, it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it." ~Christopher Morley, Kitty Foyle

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

"Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather." ~Martha Graham

"We ought to dance with rapture that we might be alive... and part of the living, incarnate cosmos." ~D.H. Lawrence

"Do you think dyslexic people have difficulty dancing to 'Y.M.C.A.'?" ~Dave Sokolowski

"Socrates learned to dance when he was seventy because he felt that an essential part of himself had been neglected." ~Source Unknown

"To watch us dance is to hear our hearts speak." ~Hopi Indian Saying

"Anyone who says sunshine brings happiness has never danced in the rain." ~Author Unknown

"Part of the joy of dancing is conversation. Trouble is, some men can't talk and dance at the same time." ~ Ginger Rogers

"Dancing is my gift and my life... God gave me this gift to bring delight to others. I am haunted by the need to dance. It is the purest expression of every emotion, earthly and spiritual. It is happiness." ~ Anna Pavlova

"Dance is the movement of the universe concentrated in an individual." ~ Isadora Duncan

"The energy doesn't end at the hands. I want such intensity that it feels like light is streaming from every finger." ~ Bob Fosse

"Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music." ~ George Carlin

"The truest expression of a people is in its dance and its music." ~ Agnes De Mille

"Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?" ~ Lewis Caroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

"You can't dance if you got too much muck in your head." ~ Yoko Ono

"Don't dance for the audience; dance for yourself." ~ Bob Fosse

"A day I don't dance is a day I don't live." ~ Anonymous Tunisian dancer, quoted in Serpent of the Nile, page 196 (1989)

"I am NOT a belly dancer. I have never been one, and never will be. What I do is not what Hollywood vulgarly calls "belly dance", but it's art. I have traveled the world to prove that my dance is not a dance of the belly but a refined, artistic dance full of tradition, of dreaming and beauty. Oriental dance is primarily an expressive dance, in that resides the beauty." ~ Nadia Gamal, in an interview with Scoop magazine, page 70.

"Work like you don't need the money, love like your heart has never been broken, and dance like no one is watching." ~ Aurora Greenway

"Dance as though no one is watching you. Love as though you have never been hurt before. Sing as though no one can hear you. Live as though heaven is on earth." ~ Unknown

"We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance." ~ Japanese Proverb

"You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life." ~ J. Krishnamurti, Indian Philosopher

"Of all the Arts, none remain as rooted in ritual as Dance." ~ Unknown

"Dancing is a relatively safe form of intoxication." ~ Unknown

"Compare the dancer to a flame, to any phenomenon that is visibly sustained by the intense consumption of a superior energy." ~ Unknown

"Dancing is used to express the 'inexpressible residue of emotion' which mere rationality cannot convey. ~ Unknown

"When the tango made its appearance in the old world in 1910, it released a dance frenzy, almost a mania, which attacked all ages and classes with the same virulence...this dance madness proves that man of the machine age...has just as much need of the dance as the primitive. For him too the dance is life on another plane." ~ Unknown

"Dance 'til the stars come down with the rafters. Dance, dance, dance 'til you drop." ~ W.H.Auden A.MacNeice

"All our lives we search for someone who makes us complete. We choose partners and change partners. We dance the song of heartbreak and hope all the while,wondering if somewhere,somehow there is someone searching for us." ~ Unknown

"In life as in dance: Grace glides on blistered feet." ~ Alice Abrams

"I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself." ~ Mikhail Baryshnikov


"Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion." ~ Agnes De Mille