I. Frost's Selected Quotations

Movement Is Life

My motto - sans limites.

I do not teach children, I give them joy.

Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.

In each human being, and above all in children and artists, there exists a sixth sense which enables us to divine the psychology of a soul, or a group of men, or a town. It is this sixth sense which has dictated all my artistic career.

I would rather live in Russia on black bread and vodka than in the United States at the best hotels. America knows nothing of food, love or art."

If I could say it, I wouldn ' t have to dance it.

Virtuous people are simply those who have not been tempted sufficiently, because they live in a vegetative state, or because their purposes are so concentrated in one direction that they have not had the leisure to glance around them.

The finest inheritance you can give to a child is to allow it to make its own way, completely on its own feet.

The artist is the only lover, he alone has the pure vision of beauty, and love is the vision of the soul when it is permitted to gaze upon immortal beauty.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage

America knows nothing of food, love, or art

Many dancers on the stage today are vulgar because they conceal and do not reveal.They would be much less suggestive if they were nude.

The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.

For me the dance is not only the art that gives expression to the human soul through movement, but also the foundation of a complete conception of life, more free,more harmonious, more natural

Dancing: The Highest Intelligence in the Freest Body.

We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity.

Art is not necessary at all. All that is necessary to make this world a better place to live in is to love --to love as Christ loved, as Buddha loved

If my art is symbolic of any one thing, it is symbolic of the freedom of woman and her emancipation from the hide-bound conventions that are the warp and woof of Puritanism.

The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body

There are many who think, apparently, that life is a series of extremely boring habits which they call virtues. I do not believe in putting chains and a padlock on life. Life is an experience, an adventure. It is an expression. Most Americans are hypnotized by a wrong idea of life, brought to this country by the Puritans.

Most human beings today waste some 25 to 30 years of their lives before they break through the actual and conventional lies which surround them.

(What Puritan America needs is) the color Red. That is the color of the people who do the real work the of the world. That is the color of the people who have enough guimpe to their upper story to ask; "Why? Why? Why?" That's the color of the artist's and the creators, the great soldiers and fighters and poets.

(On being accused of mismanaging her costume in Boston and exposing her body):Nudeness is truth, it is beauty, it is art. Therefore it can never be vulgar; it can never be immoral. I would not wear my clothes if it were not for their warmth. My body is the temple of my art. I expose it as a shrine for the worship of beauty.

Many dancers on the stage today are vulgar because they conceal and do not reveal.They would be much less suggestive if they were nude. Yet they are allowed to perform, because they satisfy the Puritan instinct for concealed lust.

That is the disease that infects Puritans. They want to satisfy their baseness without admitting it. They are afraid of truth. A nude body repels them. A suggestively clothed body delights them. They are afraid to call their moral infirmity by its right name.

All my life I have struggled to make one authentic gesture

My Mother not only taught music but knitted caps, jackets, etc. for the big store(sweat shop). I remember often waking at dawn and seeing my Mother still knitting. Through this I came to hate Charities - rich men work poor women blind and then endow Eye Hospitals!

With what a price we pay for the glory of motherhood.

For me the dance is not only the art that gives expression to the human soul through movement, but also the foundation of a complete conception of life, more free, more harmonious, more natural

I have discovered the dance. I have discovered the art which has been lost for two thousand years.

Imagine then a dancer who, after long study, prayer and inspiration, has attained such a degree of understanding that his body is simply the luminous manifestation of his soul; whose body dances in accordance with a music heard inwardly, in an expression of something out of another, profounder world. This is the truly creative dancer; natural but not imitative, speaking in movement out of himself and out of something greater than all selves.

People do not live nowadays. They get about ten percent out of life.

So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.

We are fed nothing but lies. It begins with lies and half our lives we live with lies.

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

The real American type can never be a ballet dancer. The legs are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too free for this school of affected grace and toe walking.

The dancer's body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul.

I had learned to have a perfect nausea for the theatre: the continual repetition of the same words and the same gestures, night after night, and the caprices, the way of looking at life, and the entire rigmarole disgusted me.

So that ends my first experience with matrimony, which I always thought a highly overrated performance.

I was seeking and finally discovered the central spring of all movement, the crater of motor power, the unity from which all diversions of movement are born, the mirror of vision for the creation of dance.

Standing with one foot poised on the highest point of the Rockies, her two hands stretched out from the Atlantic to the Pacific, her fine head tossed to the sky, her forehead shining with a crown of a million stars.

Adieu, mes amis. Je vais a la gloire. reported as her last words.