S

I see dance being used as communication between body and soul, to express what is too deep to find for words.

Ruth St. Denis (1879-1968)

USA dancer

When you are fifty, you're neither young nor old; you're just uninteresting. When you are sixty, and still dancing, you become something of a curiosity. And boy! if you hit seventy, and can still get a foot off the ground, you're phenomenal!

Ruth St. Denis (1879-1968)

USA dancer

I have performed for thousands when they found me exotic, the vogue, daring, but I have danced, at any given time, for about ten people.... They were the ones that left the theater forever different from the way they were when they came in. All of my long, long life, I have danced for those ten.

Ruth St. Denis (1879-1968)

USA dancer

A dance is the devil's procession, and he that entereth into a dance, entereth into his possession.

Sir Francis de Sales

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 (1696-1750)

French general

To those of us with real understanding, dancing is the only pure art form.

Charles Schulz (1922-2000)

USA cartoonist (in Peanuts, Snoopy speaking)

To live is to dance, to dance is to live.

Charles Schulz (1922-2000)

USA cartoonist (in Peanuts, Snoopy speaking)

O come ye in peace here, or come ye in war, Or to dance at our bridal, young Lord Lochinvar?

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

Scottish novelist and poet

There was never a merry world since the fairies left off dancing.

John Selden (1584-1654)

English scholar

He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth, he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

English playwright in: The Merry Wives of Windsor

She is your treasure, she must have a husband;
I must dance bare-foot on her wedding day,
And, for your love to her, lead apes in hell.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

English playwright in: The Taming of the Shrew

When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

English playwright in: The Winter's Tale (IV, iv, 159-161)

Wooing, wedding, and repenting, is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque-pace: the first suit is hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig, and full as fantastical; the wedding, mannerly modest as a measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes repentance, and with his bad legs, falls into the cinque-pace faster and faster, till he sink into his grave.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

English playwright in: Much Ado About Nothing

Tell him there is measure in everything and so dance out the answer.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

English playwright in: Much Ado About Nothing

On dancing: A perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Irish playwright quoted in the New Statesman, March 1962

Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.

Ted Shawn (1891-1972)

USA dancer and choreographer

I believe that dance communicates man's deepest, highest and most truly spiritual thoughts and emotions far better than words, spoken or written.

Ted Shawn (1891-1972)

USA dancer and choreographer

Dancing is silent poetry.

Simonides of Ceos (556-468 BC)

Greek lyric poet

There is a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance.

Solomon (around 1000 BC)

King of Israel

Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out,
As if they feared the light;
But oh, she dances such a way!
No sun upon an Easter-day
Is half so fine a sight.

Sir John Suckling (1609-1642)

English poet In: Ballad upon a Wedding

These sort of boobies think that people come to balls to do nothing but dance; whereas everyone knows that the real business of a ball is either to look out for a wife, to look after a wife, or to look after somebody else's wife.

Robert Smith Surtees (1805-1864)

English novelist