Ruth St. Denis Quotes

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

— Ruth St. Denis

“I want to dance always, to be good and not evil, and when it is all over not to have the feeling that I might have done better.”

— Ruth St. Denis

We have the capacity to receive messages from the stars and the songs of the night winds.

— Ruth St. Denis

Our bodies are at once the receiving and transmitting stations for life itself. It is the highest wisdom to recognize this fact and train our bodies to render them sensitive and responsive to nature. art and religion.

— Ruth St. Denis

The real message of the Dance opens up the vistas of life to all who have the urge to express beauty with no other instrument than their own bodies, with no apparatus and no dependence on anything other than space.

— Ruth St. Denis

We can hear the silent voice of the spiritual universe within our own hearts.

— Ruth St. Denis

“It is not a question of who dances but of who or what does not dance.”

— Ruth St. Denis

“You and I are but specks of that rhythmic urge which is Brahma, which is Allah, which is God.”

— Ruth St. Denis

“But in reality we are accompanied by the whole dancing universe.”

— Ruth St. Denis

“We can scale the heights of mountains and see the world rayed out before us, but we fail to recognize that which is before us.”

— Ruth St. Denis

“We should realize in a vivid and revolutionary sense that we are not in our bodies but our bodies are in us.”

— Ruth St. Denis

Remembering that man is indeed the microcosm, the universe in miniature, the Divine Dance of the future should be able to convey with its slightest gestures some significance of the universe.

— Ruth St. Denis

I believe that my whole creative life stemmed from this magic hour under the stars on that hilltop.

— Ruth St. Denis

As we rise higher in the understanding of ourselves, the national and racial dissonances will be forgotten in the universal rhythms of Truth and Love.

— Ruth St. Denis

“The Gods have meant
That I should dance
And in some mystic hour
I shall move to unheard rhythms
Of the cosmic orchestra of heaven
And you will know the language
Of my wordless poems
And will come to me
For that is why I dance.”

— Ruth St. Denis

I have lived so long because in those moments when I am dancing, I am beyond time and space.

— Ruth St. Denis

“It is this mission of the dancer to contribute to the betterment of all mankind.”

— Ruth St. Denis

“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

“Right here where you and I stand, we shall behold a true and radiant world. In that world, we shall dance only our divine essence.”

— Ruth St. Denis

“Dancing of late years has been degraded to the narrow limits and low professionalism of mere mechanical proficiency, associated with the most frivolous ... phases of the stage. But this day is fading ... We are turning our gaze inward, learning to seek there the divine sources of the dance, to the end that it may flower into new and more glorious forms of beauty and wealth”

— Ruth St. Denis

“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

It was then that my religious consciousness emerged to flower years afterward into definite forms of religious dancing in which there is no sense of division between spirit and flesh, religion and art.

— Ruth St. Denis

“I see the dance being used as a means of express what is too deep, too fine for words.”

— Ruth St. Denis

“Every artist is both male and female, and ... sometimes, the two great elements are in conjunction with him, so that all by himself he suddenly gets the melody and the burst of feeling of a great symphony without any external stimuli.”

— Ruth St. Denis

“How in the end can one possibly hold anyone responsible for our own underdeveloped visions, or undeveloped strength of character?”

— Ruth St. Denis