Dance

Dance generally refers to human movement either used as a form of expression or presented in a social, spiritual or performance setting.

Sourced

• I have no desire to prove anything by it. I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance.
  • Fred Astaire, Steps in Time (1959), p325.

• On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
  No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
  To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.
  • Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III (1816), Stanza 22.

• 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, Four Riddles, no. 1 (1869); reprinted in Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1919)
• As to dancing, my dear, I never dance, unless I am allowed to do it in my own peculiar way. There is no use trying to describe it: it has to be seen to be believed. [...] Did you ever see the Rhinoceros, and the Hippopotamus, at the Zoological Gardens, trying to dance a minuet together? It is a touching sight.
  • Lewis Carroll, Letter to Gaynor Simpson (27 December 1873), in A Selection from the Letters of Lewis Carroll to his Child-Friends, ed. Evelyn M. Hatch, (London: MacMillan, 1933)

• Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
  Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
  With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
  Let me forget about today until tomorrow.
  • Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man", Bringing It All Back Home (1965)

• At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
  Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
  But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
  Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
  Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
  There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
  • T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets, "Burnt Norton", II

• 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, "The American Dance", in Modern Dance, ed. Virginia Stewart (1935)

• Ich würde nur an einen Gott glauben, der zu tanzen verstünde.
  • I would only believe in a God that knows how to dance.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885), Part I, Ch. 7

• It is sweet to dance to violins
  When Love and Life are fair:
  To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
  Is delicate and rare:
  But it is not sweet with nimble feet
  To dance upon the air!
  • Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), Pt. II, st. 9

• O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
  How can we know the dancer from the dance?
  • William Butler Yeats, "Among School Children" st. 8, The Tower (1928)

• Nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit.
• No one dances sober, unless he is insane.
  • Cicero, Pro Murena (Ch. vi, sec. 13).

• When you can tell the story of the song through your movement, it's brilliant. It comes across as so honest and not fake.
  • Napoleon D'umo. (June 2009). So You Think You Can Dance / Secrets Dancers Need 2 Know [Adobe Flash]. Los Angeles: Answers4Dancers. Accessed 2009-07-25.

The Next Karate Kid

• Never trust spiritual leader who cannot dance.
  • Who: Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita)