Ballet Dance Quotes

Dance is like life. It exists as you are flitting through it, and when it's over, it's done.

In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell. We can't dance synonyms.

Freedom to a dancer means discipline. That is what technique is for -- liberation.

It's what I always wanted to do, to show the laughter, the fun, the joy of dance.

Dance is your pulse, your heartbeat, your breathing. It's the rhythm of your life. It's the expression in time and movement,in happiness, joy, sadness and envy.

Dance every performance as if it were your last.

I believe that we learn by practice... it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which come shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit.

...all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill in dancing.

The discipline that ballet requires is obsessive. And only the ones who dedicate their whole lives are able to make it. Your toenails fall off and you peel them away and then you're asked to dance again and keep smiling. I wanted to become a professional ballet dancer.

Dance for yourself. If someone understands, good. If not, no matter.

You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls .

He [Gene Kelly] once told me dancing was a man's game, as much of a sport as baseball itself. And he made us believe that. He changed our minds and suddenly, all of America wanted to dance just like Gene Kelly.

The physical language of the body is so much more powerful than words.

Dancers work and live from the inside. They drive themselves constantly producing a glow that lights not only themselves but audience after audience.

I think most dancers would agree that the art of ballet chooses the dancer, not the other way around.

On dancing on pointe: Why don't they just get taller girls?

All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.

The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.

The mirror is not you. The mirror is you looking at yourself.

Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

Dance is your pulse, your heartbeat, your breathing. It's the rhythym of your life.

Dance exists first on this primordial level, not on an intellectual plane (even though it requires skill and intelligence). Its inmost substance cannot be reasoned, only experienced.

There are times when the simple dignity of movementcan fulfill the function of a volume of words.

Those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music.

Ballet is not technique, not a way of doing things, but a means of expression that comes perhaps more closely to the inner language of man than any other.

I would believe only in a God that knows how to Dance.

To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.

Dance is bigger than the physical body. When you extend your arm, it doesn't stop at the end of your fingers, because you're dancing bigger than that; you're dancing spirit.

Even the ears must dance.

Then come the lights shining on you from above. You are a performer. You forget all you learned, the process of technique, the fear, the pain, you even forget who you are you become one with the music, the lights, indeed one with the dance.

Dance is a song of the body. Either of joy or pain.

Technical perfection is insufficient. It is an orphan without the true soul of the dancer.

Ballet is a dance executed by the human soul.

Master technique and then forget about it and be natural.

Dancers aren't made of their technique, but their passion.

What's so wonderful about ballet is that it's mind-driven physicality. It's almost a Greek ideal of body, mind, and form.

Ballet is only good when it is great.

The vocabulary and manner of classical ballet express a high order of discipline and restraint, a sense of harmony with forces larger and more lasting than the individual.

Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.

We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams.

Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.

Dance is the hidden langauge of the soul, of the body.

Dance is an art that imprints on the soul. It is with you every moment, it expresses itself in everything you do.

The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

Football isn't a contact sport, it's a collision sport.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

Sing like there's nobody listening, And live like it's heaven on earth.

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.

I see dance being used as communication between body and soul, to express what it too deep to find for words.