Daily Inspiration Quote by Agnes de Mille

Dance, for Agnes de Mille, is not self-expression so much as self-escape with benefits. “To be out of yourself” flips the usual modern script that treats authenticity as staying inside your own feelings. She’s arguing for transcendence by technique: the body disciplined into a doorway, the ego briefly evacuated. The seduction is in the escalation - “Larger, more beautiful, more powerful” - a three-step crescendo that reads like an incantation and feels like a physical warm-up: expand, refine, intensify.

The subtext is almost mischievously democratic. De Mille was a choreographer who worked in the high cathedral of American dance and Broadway spectacle, yet she frames glory as something you can claim without pedigree: “yours for the taking.” That line carries the grit of rehearsal rooms and touring companies, where transcendence isn’t bestowed by a muse; it’s earned by repetition, sweat, and the decision to show up. Her “power” isn’t abstract empowerment language. It’s the concrete power of a trained body holding space, commanding attention, bending time for an audience that suddenly can’t look away.

Context matters: de Mille helped shape a distinctly American theatrical dance, where storytelling and movement had to communicate to mass audiences. “Glory on earth” is a pointed phrase for a stage artist - it sanctifies the physical without pretending it’s eternal. Dance won’t save your soul, she implies, but it can give you a temporary enlargement of the self that feels holy precisely because it’s fleeting, and because you made it happen.