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.
— Rudolf Nureyev
Cheerful Ballet Dancing quotations
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.
Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.
I don't want people who want to dance; I want people who have to dance.
There are shortcuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.
The Dance: A minimum of explanation, a minimum of anecdotes - and a maximum of sensations.
Ballet found me. I was discovered by a teacher in middle school. I always danced, my whole life. I never had any training, never was exposed to seeing dance, but I always had something inside of me.
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.
If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it
Master technique and then forget about it and be natural.
I do everything the man does, only backwards and in high heels!
Badminton is like ballet dancing. It requires a lot of control, strength, mind play and measured movement
It's very easy to become selfish and narrow-minded and see ballet as the only thing in life, but there's lots more.
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, Dance, Dance 'till you drop.
Nobody cares if you can't dance well.
Just get up and dance. Great dancers are great because of their passion.
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.
The mirror is not you. The mirror is you looking at yourself.
There comes a moment in a young artist's life when he knows he has to bring something to the stage from within himself. He has to put in something in order to be able to take something.
Dance is very, very old. With Louis XIV at Versailles is where ballet started.
Sing like no one is listening. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody’s watching, and live like it’s heaven on earth.
Dance is like life. It exists as you are flitting through it, and when it's over, it's done.
Dance is not an exercise. Dance is an art.
Dance for yourself. If someone understands, good. If not, no matter.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance, tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.
Figure skating has been a great influence for me.
I took dance at the School of American Ballet, which helped my own skating. And whether you are a skater or a dancer, without sounding narcissistic, it is all about looking in the mirror.
There are times when the simple dignity of movementcan fulfill the function of a volume of words.
Nothing so clearly and inevitably reveals the inner man than movement and gesture. It is quite possible, if one chooses, to conceal and dissimulate behind words or paintings or statues or other forms of human expression, but the moment you move you stand revealed, for good or ill, for what you are.
When she goes about her kitchen duties, chopping, carving, mixing, whisking, she moves with the grace and precision of a ballet dancer, her fingers plying the food with the dexterity of a croupier.
Anyone interested in design must be interested in other fields of expression - theater, ballet, photography, literature, music.
Technical perfection is insufficient. It is an orphan without the true soul of the dancer.
Even the ears must dance.
Young dancers are training at a very vulnerable time in their lives.
.. So train the whole person, not just the dancer.
Dancing is like dreaming with your feet!
Dancers work and live from the inside.
They drive themselves constantly producing a glow that lights not only themselves but audience after audience.
Swan Lake is the most difficult thing to portray for a female ballet dancer;
it really requires such specific qualities of articulation, agility, strength, and the arm work is something that takes a lot of training.
What's so wonderful about ballet is that it's mind-driven physicality.
It's almost a Greek ideal of body, mind, and form.
Dance every performance as if it were your last.
The only weapon I had was my dancing. With that I fought like a general without an army. If I could have saved all the energy I wasted on my struggle it would have sufficed me to cover a dozen ballets.
To dance, put your hand on your heart and listen to the sound of your soul.
The physical language of the body is so much more powerful than words.
Dance is like wine; it matures with every performance.
I think most dancers would agree that the art of ballet chooses the dancer, not the other way around.
When you take dancing lessons, you learn steps and you learn steps and you learn steps. It can go on for a long time. And then one day, you just learn to dance, and it is so different.
Dancing is the body made poetic.