A dancer must listen to his body and pay homage to it. Behind the movement lies this terrible, driving passion, this necessity. I won’t settle for anything less.
MARTHA GRAHAMFire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.
More Martha Graham Quotes
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Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
People have asked me why I chose to be a dancer. I did not choose. I was chosen to be a dancer, and with that, you live all your life.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
The body is a sacred garment. It’s your first and last garment; it is what you enter life in and what you depart life with, and it should be treated with honor.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Nothing is more revealing than movement.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
The unique must be fulfilled.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Dance is a song of the body. Either of joy or pain.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Modern dance isn’t anything except one thing in my mind: the freedom of women in America.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
You don’t pick dance. Dance picks you.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
The reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol of the performance of living.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
What makes a great dancer is not technique. What makes a great dancer is passion.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
I am certain that movement never lies. There is only one law of posture I have been able to discover – the perpendicular line connecting heaven and earth.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
I get up, I fall down, all the while I am dancing.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Discipline is liberation.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
I did not choose to be a dancer. I was chosen.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
I am absorbed in the magic of movement and light. Movement never lies. It is the magic of what I call the outer space of the imagination.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Dancers today can do anything; the technique is phenomenal. The passion and the meaning to their movement can be another thing.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Wherever a dancer stands is holy ground.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
My dancing is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
Some of you are doomed to be artists.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
In a dancer, there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength.
MARTHA GRAHAM -
The center of the stage is where I am.
MARTHA GRAHAM