Moving or standing perfectly still, in sync with sound or silence, dance is an evocation of the self in space and in relation to others.
~ Unknown
There are shortcuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.
~ Vicki Baum
Stifling an urge to dance is bad for your health—it rusts your spirit and your hips.
~ Adabella Radici
Socrates learned to dance when he was seventy because he felt that an essential part of himself had been neglected.
~ Source Unknown
When someone blunders, we say that he makes a misstep. Is it then not clear that all the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill our history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill in dancing?
~ Moliere, 1622
I see dance being used as communication between body and soul, to express what is too deep to find for words.
~ Ruth St. Denis
While I dance I cannot judge, I cannot hate, I cannot separate myself from life. I can only be joyful and whole. That is why I dance.
~ Hans Bos
Any problem in the world can be solved by dancing.
~ James Brown
Contra dance is Real People in Real Time with Real Music. It is Real Life.
~ from Gary Shapiro's What is Contra Dance? page
I've never seen so many smiles in one place!
~ a new Houston dancer
It's like a rhythmic swirl of awesomeness and dancing.
~ Alix Hamburger, a 10th grader describing contra dance.
For the good are always the merry, Save by an evil chance;
And the merry love the fiddle, And the merry love to dance.
~ from The Fiddler of Dooney ~ William Butler Yeats
As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands—one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.
~ Audrey Hepburn
After 15 years of dancing, I realized that someone has to do work to keep the dances going. What a revelation!
~ Gaye Fifer
I know of no better image for the ideal of a beautiful society than a well executed English dance, composed of many complicated figures and turns. A spectator located on the balcony observes an infinite variety of criss-crossing motions which keep decisively but arbitrarily changing directions without ever colliding with each other. Everything has been arranged in such a manner that each dancer has already vacated his position by the time the other arrives. Everything fits so skillfully, yet so spontaneously, that everyone seems to be following his own lead, without ever getting in anyone’s way. Such a dance is the perfect symbol of one’s own individually asserted freedom as well as of one’s respect for the freedom of the other.
~ Friedrich Schiller, from Kallias, or On the Beautiful.