Inspirational Quotes: Metaphors of Dance

Once you’ve read our ideas of how to incorporate inspirational quotes into your dance studio’s repertoire of ways to serve your dancers, we hope you’ll find inspiring some of these quotes below about the heart of dance and dancers and some quotes that relate more to the broader themes of dance, especially as it relates to the rest of life and nature.

The Dance of Life

The following quotes venture into the philosophical, but as dance professionals we’d be remiss to let ourselves or our students forget how often dance is seen as a metaphor for the best of life and the ideal way to move through it.

“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to be over, it’s about learning how to dance in the rain.” Author Unknown

“The journey between who you once were, and who you are now becoming, is where the dance of life really takes place.” Barbara De Angelis

“There are those who dance to the rhythm that is played to them, those who only dance to their own rhythm, and those who don’t dance at all.” Jose Bergamin

“To learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same.” Martha Graham

“I want to dance. I want to live.” Domenico Dolce

“It’s like dance is a metaphor for going beyond where you think you can go.” Jennifer Grey

Dance, Nature & the Transcendent

As much as dance can be a metaphor for life, the movements of dance are often compared to flying and even surpassing natural boundaries of space, even into the eternal realm. You’ll also find some quotes listed below that point out the physical benefits which dance offers the body. From physical health to the cosmos, dance connects rather than contradicts so many aspects of science and of faith.

“Birds use their wings to fly, because they do not know how to dance.” Zeynep Okcu

“Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!” William Butler Yeats

“Dancing is a very healthy thing to do for our body.” Yoko Ono

“Dancing faces you towards Heaven, whichever direction you turn.” Sweetpea Tyler

“Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn’t burn up any fossil fuel, doesn’t pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.” Margaret Mead

“He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.” Friedrich Nietzsche