Pro Murena (Chapter VI, sec. 13)
Nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit.
“Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.”
Isabella Linton (Ch. XVII).
Wuthering Heights (1847)
“Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music.”
Misattributed
First recorded appearance: Germaine de Staël's On Germany (1813). ". . . sometimes even in the habitual course of life, the reality of this world disappears all at once, and we feel ourselves in the middle of its interests as we should at a ball, where we did not hear the music; the dancing that we saw there would appear insane." There are several other pre-Nietzsche examples, indicating that the phrase was widespread in the nineteenth-century; it was referred to in 1927 as an "old proverb".
Variant: Almost dead yesterday, maybe dead tomorrow, but alive, gloriously alive, today.
Source: Lord of Chaos
“There's a dancing bear in Corus who's almost as shaggy as I am.”
Myles of Olau
“Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing.”
In Plato's Cave, p. 8 http://books.google.com/books?id=B8DktTyeRNkC&q=%22Photography+has+become+almost+as+widely+practiced+an+amusement+as+sex+and+dancing%22&pg=PA8#v=onepage
Previously published as Photography http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1973/oct/18/photography/ in The New York Review of Books, 18 October 1973
On Photography (1977)
“And everything comes to One,
As we dance on, dance on, dance on.”
Once More, the Round," ll. 11-12
The Far Field (1964)
Context: p>And I dance with William Blake
For love, for Love's sake;And everything comes to One,
As we dance on, dance on, dance on.</p
“He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
“The slave who dances is free… while he is dancing.”
Source: Island Beneath the Sea
