Quotes on Ballet

Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic, there's a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can't exist without it.

Don't hold on to the barre like, 'I might die.' It's just ballet.

I want the ballet world to be given the respect that it deserves and to be seen by more people - for so many to experience the beauty that I've received from the ballet world.

Some people are painters, and some are ballet dancers, and I'm a writer.

My family didn't have very much money, so ballet wasn't even on my radar; I just found it randomly when I was 13 at a Boys & Girls Club. We were practicing in a basketball court in gym clothes with some old socks on. Even though it terrified me at first, I found that I really liked it.

Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

Dancing is the poetry of the foot.

The more you lose yourself in something bigger than yourself, the more energy you will have.

Technique is what you fall back on when you run out of inspiration.

Without dancing you can never attain a perfectly graceful carriage, which is of the highest importance in life.

Muse of the many twinkling feet, whose charms are now extending up from legs to arms.

Come knit hands, and beat the ground in a light fantastic round

Be. Good. To yourself, to other people, to everything you do. It's a norm of life by which people should try to live. Don't waste time. Be interesting and interested.

Ballet is the fairies' baseball.

It is shameful that dancing should renounce the empire it might assert over the mind and only endeavor to please the sight.

A genius is a talented person who does his homework.

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 arts. . . . The important thing in ballet is the movement itself. A ballet may contain a story, but the visual spectacle . . . is the essential element. The choreographer and the dancer must remember that they reach the audience through the eye. It's the illusion created which convinces the audience, much as it is with the work of a magician.

Every ballet, whether or not successful artistically or with the public, has given me something important.

Dancing is a very crude attempt to get into the rhythm of life.

Football is the ballet of the masses.