1) Do you not realize that dance is the pure act of metamorphosis? -- Paul Valéry

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

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

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

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

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
For a visual rendering of this idea, using one of Lois Greenfield's splendid images, click HERE.

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) Never criticize your dance partner. -- Brave Combo

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

"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:

"Alas! our dancing days are no more. We wish, however, all those who have a relish for so agreeable and innocent an amusement all the pleasure the season will afford them. . . ."

More good dance aphorisms -- assembled by Professor Tom!