Daily Inspiration Quote by Doris Humphrey

Humphrey is arguing for movement as its own kind of meaning-making, not an accessory to story, music, or costume. When she says certain movements "impinge upon the nerves", she chooses a bodily verb on purpose: dance doesn’t politely “express” feeling, it lands on the audience as sensation first. That phrasing treats spectatorship as physiology. You don’t decode a pirouette the way you parse a sentence; you flinch, lean in, breathe differently. She’s staking a claim for modern dance as an art that communicates through the nervous system before it ever reaches the intellect.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the ballet-and-vaudeville expectations of her era, where virtuosity could become decorative and narrative could become a crutch. Humphrey, a central figure in American modern dance, helped build a language (think fall and recovery, weight, gravity, suspension) that made emotion legible through physical forces. Her emphasis on movement’s “incomparable” strength reads like a manifesto: dance doesn’t need translation into words to be “serious.” It is serious because it can reorganize how the body feels time, pressure, desire, panic, release.

Context matters here: early 20th-century modernism was obsessed with direct experience, with stripping away sentimental polish to get closer to raw perception. Humphrey’s line fits that project. It also anticipates a contemporary truth: in an age saturated with talk, the arts that hit you somatically can feel more honest, or at least harder to fake. Movement, she implies, bypasses spin and goes straight to the gut.