Ted Shawn Quotes

The Dancer believes that his art has something to say which cannot be expressed in words or in any other way than by dancing... there are times when the simple dignity of movement can fulfill the function of a volume of words. There are movements which impinge upon the nerves with a strength that is incomparable, for movement has power to stir the senses and emotions, unique in itself. This is the dancer's justification for being, and his reason for searching further for deeper aspects of his art.

As Buddhists, statues are more than simply pieces of stone to us. We believe the statue of the Buddha has a kind of soul and is the Buddha in some sense. This is why we can pray to it. Clay is a very interesting and fundamental material - it's earth, it's water and - with fire - it takes on form and life. In fact, what is art? Art is giving to what you create a soul. That's why it is said God is like an artist.

Man has used human rhythmic movement as raw material out of which to create works of art, as the composer of music uses sound, the sculptor uses stone and wood, the painter his pigments, and the writer - words.

when dancing is right, the movement possesss a logic common to us all, an inevitability that takes it beyond the personal and egocentric and makes of it classical art.

I believe that dance has the power to heal, mentally and physically.

Apart from God nothing matters. We think that health matters, that freedom matters, or knowledge or art or civilization. And but for one insistent word they would matter indeed. That word is eternity.

God seems willing to act as the most sublime psychologist, psychotherapist, or even psychiatrist if we are willing.

It’s one of my loose theories that Catholicism and art have gone well together because both believe in the physical manifestation of the spiritual world.

A work becomes a work of art when one re-evaluates the values of nature and adds one's own spirituality.

For me, art is a more trustworthy expression of God than religion.

Dancing is a part of my life where when I don't dance I feel like there's something missing because I'm such a physical person who loves to express myself through dance, but I love to act. I love to sing. I love to entertain so if I'm passionate about a certain project, I wanna do it.

Art opens the closets, airs out the cellars and attics. It brings healing.

The dance is the highest symbol of life itself.

I do believe - and I know I shouldn't - that art transcends money and success and any of that. You can still do it if you're not clinging to the notion of nobility.

Dance is about never-ending aspiration.

The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.

Art is the pure realization of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God. ... The ability to believe is our outstanding quality, and only art adequately translates it into reality. But when we assuage our need for faith with an ideology we court disaster.

She danced because she needed to. She needed to say things which could be said in no other way, and she needed to take her meaning and her living from the saying of them.

I believe dance is a manifestation and celebration of the tenacity of the human spirit.

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

The ballet. I saw in the fugitive beauty of a dancer's gesture a symbol of life. It was achieved at the cost of unending effort but, with all the forces of gravity against it, a fleeting poise in mid-air, a lovely attitude worthy to be made immortal in a bas-relief, it was lost as soon as it was gained and there remained no more than the memory of an exquisite emotion. So life, lived variously and largely, becomes a work of art only when brought to its beautiful conclusion and is reduced to nothingness in the moment when it arrives at perfection.

Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.

In song and dance, man forgets how to walk and speak and is on the way into flying into the air, dancing... his very gestures express enchantment.

Believe me, the library is the temple of God. Education is the most sacred religion of all.

We must first realize that dancing is an absolutely independent art, not merely a secondary accompanying one. I believe that it is one of the great arts. . . . The important thing in ballet is the movement itself. A ballet may contain a story, but the visual spectacle . . . is the essential element. The choreographer and the dancer must remember that they reach the audience through the eye. It's the illusion created which convinces the audience, much as it is with the work of a magician.