Dancer Quotes

When I miss class for one day, I know it.

When I miss class for two days, my teacher knows it. When I miss class for three days, the audience knows it.

Why are you stingy with yourselves? Why are you holding back? What are you saving for - for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.

I'm not interested in fame and glory.

It's just that I would like others to know what a happy dance this is.

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.

Our arms start from the back because they were once wings.

If you don't feel challenged, it's because you're not doing enough.

Ballet should never feel comfortable. Comfortable is lazy! If you're comfortable when you dance, you're not pushing yourself hard enough. 100 % is not enough. You have to give 200%. One tendu takes years of hard work and will never be perfect. Everything in ballet is a challenge.

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty if you're very lucky and have said your prayers.

A creative person has to create. It doesn't really matter what you create. If such a dancer wanted to go out and build the cactus gardens where he could, in Mexico, let him do that, but something that is creative has to go on.

Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.

In my ballets, woman is first. Men are consorts. God made men to sing the praises of women. They are not equal to men: They are better.

I've never seen a Lindy Hopper who wasn't smiling. It's a happy dance. It makes you feel good.

I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.

Success depends in a very large measure upon individual initiative and exertion, and cannot be achieved except by a dint of hard work.

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 .

I don't want people who want to dance; I want people who have to dance.

There's no thinking involved in my choreography.

.. I don't work through images or ideas. I work through the body... If the dancer dances, which is not the same as having theories about dancing or wishing to dance or trying to dance, everything is there. When I dance, it means: this is what I am doing.

Surely the day will come when color means nothing more than the skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one's soul; when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood.

The wind? I am the wind. The sea and the moon? I am the sea and the moon. Tears, pain, love, bird-flights? I am all of them. I dance what I am. Sin, prayer, flight, the light that never was on land or sea? I dance what I am.

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

Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.

One is born to be a dancer. No teacher can work miracles, nor will years of training make a good dancer of an untalented pupil. One may be able to acquire a certain technical facility, but no one can ever 'acquire an exceptional talent.' I have never prided myself on having an unusually gifted pupil. A Pavlova is no one's pupil but God's.

Remember that you are unique. If that is not fulfilled, then something wonderful has been lost.

Master technique and then forget about it and be natural.

The body says what words cannot.

If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it

Dance is music made visible

You are on the eve of a complete victory. You can't go wrong. The world is behind you.

Genius is another word for magic, and the whole point of magic is that it is inexplicable.

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

Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it.

The body is a sacred garment. It's your first and last garment; it is what you enter life in and what you depart life with, and it should be treated with honor.

Where there is no heart there is no art.

Dancing: The Highest Intelligence in the Freest Body.

The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to become moments of dancing too.

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

Ballet dancing is arduous, strenuous activity.

Students are engaged in physical training that rivals the training Olympic athletes undergo. At the same time, they strive for physical perfection not for the prowess alone but as a way of achieving the means necessary to express the pure nature of their art.

One day I realized I was living in a country where I was afraid to be black.

It was only a country for white people. Not black. So I left. I had been suffocating in the United States... A lot of us left, not because we wanted to leave, but because we couldn't stand it anymore... I felt liberated in Paris.

Choreography is simpler than you think.

Just go and do, and don't think so much about it. Just make something interesting.

God creates, I do not create. I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it - from what I see, from what the dancers can do, from what others do.

You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you.

Just as the ancients danced to call upon the spirits in nature, we too can dance to find the spirits within ourselves that have been long buried and forgotten.

It's like the time capsule with everything in it.

Or like the seed that when you plant it, becomes the enormous tree with leaves and fruit. Everybody was in that little seed, and so everything can open. The tree of dance is like that. It just takes a long, long time to blossom.

No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.

I shall dance all my life. . . . I would like to die, breathless, spent, at the end of a dance.

You must get an education. You must go to school, and you must learn to protect yourself. And you must learn to protect yourself with the pen, and not the gun.

Misery is a communicable disease.

Nobody cares if you can't dance well.

Just get up and dance. Great dancers are great because of their passion.

Go within every day and find the inner strength so that the world will not blow your candle out

To be who you are and become what you are capable of is the only goal worth living.

Death is nothing, nor life either, for that matter.

To die, to sleep, to pass into nothingness, what does it matter? Everything is an illusion.

All that is important is this one moment in movement.

Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.