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….

Ballet is important and significant - yes. But first of all, it is a pleasure..

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 ….

I cannot move, I cannot even want to move, unless I hear the music first..

Ballet dancing is arduous, strenuous activity. Students are engaged in physical training that rivals the training Olympic athletes undergo. At the sa….

See the music, hear the dance..

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

I can always invent movement, and sometimes it can be fitted into the right place, but that is not choreography. It is the music that dictates the wh….

Storyless is not abstract. Two dancers on the stage are enough material for a story; for me, they are already a story in themselves.

Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays..

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..

I don't have a past. I have a continuous present. The past is part of the present, just as the future is. We exist in time..

Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policeman, always alert, always tense. But I don't agree with that because policeman don't have t….

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

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..

Music must be seen, and dance must be heard.

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

We must first realize that dancing is an absolutely independent art, not merely a secondary accompanying one. I believe that it is one of the great a….

Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot..

What are you waiting for? What are you saving for? Now is all there is..

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