Bad-mouth Quotes

[Duvet]

For all the literary figures, celebrities, philosophers, theologians and intellectuals who think they know better about dancing.

[Dancing is] a farcical, meaningless, disgusting, brainless physical public exhibition...Not so much an accomplishment as an affliction.
Stephen Fry (2008)

Just seen Stephen Fry dancing on QI (at about 5.25 in). I think he should be encouraged more. His response to the audience reaction was interesting ("Why can't I dance without people laughing?"). He is a comedian!

[video=youtube;ZLI3Wmb0L8A]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLI3Wmb0L8A[/video]

 

[Duvet]

She dances in a foul gloom where gum bums with garlic. A sailorman, rustbearded, sips from a beaker rum and eyes her. A long and seafed silent rut. She dances, capers, wagging her sowish haunches and her hips, on her gross belly flapping a ruby egg.
James Joyce – Ulysses (1922)

Not a very pleasant image. I wonder if James Joyce ever saw bellydancing?

 

[Duvet]

You found me in evil company, highkickers, coster picnicmakers, pugilists, popular generals, immoral panto boys in fleshtights and the nifty shimmy dancers, La Aurora and Karini, musical act, the hit of the century.
James Joyce – Ulysses (1922)

And I wonder if La Aurora and Karini were based on a real shimmy-dance musical act?

 

[Duvet]

For all those dancers heading out to perform and party over the Winter season...

[Dancers] spend several hours together under the excitement of lively strains of music and of the glittering array of beauty and fashion, in a chamber brilliant with a multitude of dazzling lights, and crowded with guests to the destruction of the vital properties of the atmosphere; and in physical exertions to which they have been unaccustomed, and which open all the pores of the skin.

The system is also deranged by loading the stomach with indigestible food, and by encroaching on the ordinary and necessary hours of repose. Then with heated and wearied frames, in that state peculiarly exposed to the injurious action of the cold, they suddenly exchange the warm temperature of the assembly chamber for the chilliness of the damp night air….

Alas! In that wintry blast consumption smites his smiling victims, and fills up the weekly calendar of his fearful ravages. In our large cities, where this insane contempt of health and life is sanctioned… this fell destroyer snatches his prey from the ranks of fashion by scores, and scourges them more fatally than the pestilence.
John F. Mesick - A Discourse on the Evils of Dancing (1846)

[video=youtube;CFYjY1xW9zw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFYjY1xW9zw[/video]

...You have been warned!!

 

[Zorba]

Brrrrrrrr!!!!!

 

[Mosaic]

She dances in a foul gloom where gum bums with garlic. A sailorman, rustbearded, sips from a beaker rum and eyes her. A long and seafed silent rut. She dances, capers, wagging her sowish haunches and her hips, on her gross belly flapping a ruby egg.
James Joyce – Ulysses (1922)

Not a very pleasant image. I wonder if James Joyce ever saw bellydancing?

Not a pleasant image as you mentioned, but I did have to laugh. As for bellydancing in the snow ... well it takes a lot of crazy to do that:lol: It's a wonder her shimmies don't freeze - brings to mind the saying of freeze your butt off
~Mosaic

 

[Duvet]

She dances in a foul gloom where gum bums with garlic. A sailorman, rustbearded, sips from a beaker rum and eyes her. A long and seafed silent rut. She dances, capers, wagging her sowish haunches and her hips, on her gross belly flapping a ruby egg.
James Joyce – Ulysses (1922)

Not a very pleasant image. I wonder if James Joyce ever saw bellydancing?

Found and posted something here; http://bellydanceforums.net/threads/18390-French-and-British-men-bellydancing?highlight= (scroll down to post #7).
I doubt it was his source of inspiration. Yet who knows!!

 

[Duvet]

Miss Beecher, who ranks with the most distinguished ladies of our country, and who owes her reputation...to her intelligence, refinement, and virtue, speaks of this art [dance] in the strongest terms of disapprobation. "In the fifteen years during which she had the care of young ladies, she affirms she has never known any case where learning this art, and following the amusement, did not have a bad effect, either on the habits, the intellect, the feelings or the health."
John F. Mesick - A Discourse on the Evils of Dancing (1846)

 

[Duvet]

“It is better to dig or to plough on the Lord’s day, than to dance. Instead of singing psalms to the lyre or psaltery, as virgins and matrons were wont to do, they now waste their time in dancing, and even employ masters in that art.”
Augustine of Hippo - 8th Sermon (early 5[SUP]th[/SUP] Century AD)

 

[Duvet]

At certain feasts “…when the music gave the signal, the king [Antiochus IV Epiphanes of the Seleucid Empire] would leap up, and dance and sport among the actors, so that they were all ashamed. To such absurdities does a want of education, when joined with drunkenness, reduce miserable men.”
Athenaeus - The Deipnosophists (c.190 AD) but quoting a lost portion of Polybius – Histories, Book 31 (c.140 BC)

 

[Duvet]

[The philosopher Apollonius urged the Ephesians] "...to devote themselves to philosophy alone, and to fill Ephesus with real study rather than with idleness and arrogance such as he found around him there; for they were devoted to dancers and taken up with pantomimes, and the whole city was full of pipers, and full of effeminate rascals, and full of noise. So at the risk of estranging the Ephesians, he determined not to condone such things, but cleared them out and made them odious to most of them."
Philostratus – Life of Apollonius of Tyana; Book IV, Ch.II (217/238 AD)

 

[Duvet]

And we speak not of those exotic and barbarous dances recently imported into fashionable circles, one more shocking than the other; one cannot imagine anything more suitable for banishing all the remains of modesty.
Pope Benedict XV (1921)

 

[Duvet]

Dancing is the vilest vice of all
Henrich Cornelius Agrippa (1527)

 

[Duvet]

Nobody wanted your dance,
Nobody wanted your strange glitter - your floundering
Drowning life and your effort to save yourself,
Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,
Looking for something to give

Ted Hughes - Birthday Letters (1998)

 

[da Sage]

Frisky camel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIOBTCBHyAw

 

[Duvet]

In the immortal words of children everywhere, “Belly dancing is stupid.”

Dr. Caramine White – Running Naked Through The Streets (2008)

 

[Aniseteph]

Nobody wanted your dance,
Nobody wanted your strange glitter - your floundering
Drowning life and your effort to save yourself,
Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,
Looking for something to give

Ted Hughes - Birthday Letters (1998)

Now that has made my day, thank you Duvet. So much summed up in so few words, poetic genius or what? Buuuuut we're doing it anyway so haa ha haa haa, suck it up and get over it Ted! :tongue::tongue::tongue:

Clearly he has been one of the friends and family at a hafla whose supportive streak has been overtaken by his oh no please not again stop asking me to come to these things streak.

 

[Duvet]

Dances are like mushrooms; the best are not good for much.

A paraphrase from St.Francis de Sales - Introduction to the Devout Life (1609)

 

[Duvet]

Francis de Sales was a laugh a minute down at the old dance hall -

"And while you were dancing time passed by, and death drew nearer. Trifle as you may, the awful dance of death must come"

"Again while you were dancing, many a soul has passed away amid sharp sufferings; thousands and tens of thousands were lying all the while on beds of anguish, some perhaps untended, unconsoled, in fevers, and all manner of painful diseases....[R]emember that a day will come when you in your turn will lie on your bed of sickness, while others dance and make merry."

 

[Duvet]

"Happiness is the reward of industry and labour. Dancing is a waste of time."
Cyd Charisse, in Silk Stockings (1957)

"Women! Dancing! Where's it get you? I figure on making other people dance - dancin' ain't my idea of a man's game."
Edward Goldenberg Robinson, in Little Caesar (1931)

Both the above are quotes by characters in films.