Top 100 Ballet Dance Quotes
#1. My mother was the influence on me - my father was absent. He was a diamond dealer; he was doing wonderful things in the background, and women were left at home. So my mother really was in charge of everything: the ballet, dance lessons, piano lessons, and latkes.
Maira Kalman
#2. Simplicity itself is the key. Education in ballet, dance, martial arts, etc., is done through poses, or to be more precise, through a countless series of poses. Perfection of movement is achieved through the flow of perfectly rehearsed poses.
Nicholas Romanov
#3. Dance till the stars come down from the rafters
Dance, Dance, Dance 'till you drop.
W. H. Auden
#4. I could never make a ballet by wrinkling my brow and concentrating. If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece, how will you ever get it finished?
George Balanchine
#5. 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.
Misty Copeland
#6. Dance is very, very old. With Louis XIV at Versailles is where ballet started.
Neve Campbell
#7. It's okay to dress up like another person, but never try to be someone else. Just try to be yourself, because that's what makes you special. Oh, and watch out if a dragon ever starts to dance ballet.
Jeff Hutchins
#9. But it's this one boy, hanging over a barre, sharing his history, who ended up here with me, in this moment, by pure fate. I wonder what it would be like to kiss him.
Jessica Calla
#10. I wasn't a dancer learning to play Baby Houseman. I was Baby Houseman learning to play a dancer. I was someone who'd never done any Latin dance. I'd taken jazz classes and ballet growing up in New York, so I had dance in me, and I knew I loved it, but I'd never done a dance audition.
Jennifer Grey
#11. I was used to dancing, but only when someone told you what to do. So in the nightclub I was all over the place, I combined everything. Street dance, modern dance, a bit of jazz and ballet, I was Twyla Tharp, I was Alvin Ailey, I was Michael Jackson. I didn't care, I was free.
Madonna Ciccone
#12. What's so wonderful about ballet is that it's mind-driven physicality. It's almost a Greek ideal of body, mind, and form.
Edward Villella
#13. Americans will be amazed to find ho many of the modern dance steps are relics of the African heritage.
Paul Robeson
#14. 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 single fleeting moment when you feel alive.
Merce Cunningham
#15. You have to be able to cut off from the ballet and relax, or you have anxiety dreams at night, worrying about what you're going to dance the next day, going over every little detail.
Darcey Bussell
#16. Hip hop classes and ballet are what I've been keeping up with, and of course my usual abdominal workout, which consists of 500 sit-ups a session. Or I take a 30-minute abs class at my gym. But dance classes are a full-body cardio workout, which always brings me success and keeps me feeling great.
Briana Evigan
#17. Master technique and then forget about it and be natural.
Anna Pavlova
#18. Every teacher will tell you that you cannot dance classical technique with perfection, there is no such thing, there is no way. So you have to adapt the technique to your abilities or to your deficiencies. Learn to cheat!
Jiri Kylian
#19. The ballet embodies the notes of music. And sometimes you almost feel like you can see the notes dance up there on the stage.
Robert Caro
#20. I've always loved dancing. As soon as there is good music, I've got to get up and dance. I was passionate about ballet as a little girl.
Cherie Lunghi
#21. I trained in every form of dance - started as a tap dancer when I was a kid, then contemporary, ballet, ballroom, everything. Russian, Swedish.
Nigel Lythgoe
#23. I started Ballet at a very young age and I was captivated immediately. It became my voice, means to overcome those final barriers to expressing myself. Letting myself fly free. The more experience I have, the more I get to know myself.
Amanda McKerrow
#24. 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.
Bill Austin
#26. 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.
Vera Wang
#28. Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
Agnes De Mille
#29. I've studied dance since I was very young, and I continue to study ballet.
Sarah Gadon
#30. I attended Professional Children's School in Manhattan because my ballet and modern dance schedules were intensive and had started to interfere with regular school hours.
Essence Atkins
#32. Ballet found me, I guess you could say. 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. I would love to choreograph and dance around.
Misty Copeland
#33. I used to dance for seventeen years -classical ballet, which was very disciplined. I like yoga and Pilates, but I don't have the discipline to go to the gym.
Penelope Cruz
#34. It's very easy to become selfish and narrow-minded and see ballet as the only thing in life, but there's lots more.
Darcey Bussell
#35. A major assumption that underlies this selection is that it is only within work that is progressive, experimental or avant-garde that staid, old-fashioned images and ideas about gender can be challenged and alternatives imagined. I have never seen a ballet performance that has not disappointed me.
Ramsay Burt
#36. In the ballet studio, it was such an organized and disciplined environment, like I'd never had in my life. Seeing myself in the mirror, surrounded by the classical music, that's when I started to fall in love with dance.
Misty Copeland
#38. I had never picked up a basketball before. I went through a grueling audition process. It was almost as if I was learning to walk. It would be like teaching somebody to dance ballet for a role.
Sanaa Lathan
#39. If you wanna dance, a windshield wiper'll do it-all you need is a beat.
Artie Shaw
#40. My years of ballet and jazz dance lessons didn't make me any more graceful - they just helped keep me from bumping into the furniture on stage.
Toni Tennille
#42. We must never forget that the dance is the cradle of Negro music.
Alain LeRoy Locke
#43. If Balanchine had any secret, it was one that has endured through two hundred years of classical ballet. It is that dancing correctly in three dimensions, on the music, creates the fourth dimension of meaning.
Arlene Croce
#44. Do ballet and play football. Sing and dance. Laugh and cry.
Michael Skolnik
#45. You know, ballet might be too formal of a title for the type of dance I do, but I love to dance.
Jeff Bridges
#46. I do take class because I still dance, and yes, I do slip into class with the Royal Ballet from time to time.
Deborah Bull
#47. Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.
George Balanchine
#48. I started taking ballet lessons when I was three and a half and I still take dance classes.
Oksana Baiul
#49. The worst thing about me is my toes. I've thick joints from wearing pointe ballet shoes - I went to a dance school from the age of 11 and danced every day.
Pixie Lott
#50. I had to do a tango with Raft and I learned to dance in ballet shoes with my knees bent.
Marie Windsor
#51. The choreographer cannot deliberately make a ballet to appeal to an audience, he has to start from personal inspirations. He has to trust the ballet, to let it stand on its own strengths or fall on its weaknesses. If it reaches the audience, then he is lucky that round!
Gerald Arpino
#52. One of the most beautiful sights in dance is American Ballet Theatre in full flight.
Clive Barnes
#53. I began with dance, doing ballet at 3, then tap, jazz, modern. Then I sang in church choirs, learned how to play clarinet and drums, sang with rock bands and only then did I get into musical theatre.
Samantha Barks
#54. My grandmother had a Miss Margaret's School of Dance to teach tap and ballet to kids, but I never studied it. I was raised a Mormon and they're dancing fools. It's the only vice they have - dancing.
Michelle Shocked
#55. Ten thousand saw I at a glance, tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
William Wordsworth
#56. It was something I was more interested in myself. When I went to see my sister dance at ballet, I was really into costumes and the arts, and my family was also supportive of whatever me and my sister wanted to do. I would say I pushed myself the most to be into design.
Christian Siriano
#57. 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.
Penelope Cruz
#58. In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell ... we can't dance synonyms.
George Balanchine
#59. I didn't grow up on dance class. I was always natural. I've been in the industry since I was eight and I've always had a choreographer since then. But I never really took ballet or anything like that.
Marques Houston
#60. A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet. I'm beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.
Twyla Tharp
#61. When I was a little kid, I took tap and ballet. I've always loved to dance. I'm a rhythm machine.
Tommy Lee
#62. When you are on stage in front of an audience, you want to engage the entire crowd. If a thousand people are in the theater, you need to dance a thousand different ways, not one-thousandth of a way.
Suzanne Farrell
#63. Ballet is not technique but a way of expression that comes more closely to the inner language of man than any other.
George Sava
#64. The eternal and uneasy relationship between ballet and modern dance endures, but radically altered in tone and intensity.
Robert Gottlieb
#65. At the time I started in ballet they were dancing 'The Spirit of Champagne' on pointe, in Paris. I thought, 'I don't want to dance the spirit of champagne, I want to drink it!
Martha Graham
#66. In order to dance well, nothing is so important as the turning outwards of the thigh; and nothing is so natural to men as the contrary position.
Jean-Georges Noverre
#67. I love dancing, actually. My mother taught children's dance, ballet, tap, jazz ... I'm very flexible.
Michael Angarano
#68. I was born in Toronto and studied with the National Ballet of Canada. I went to school to study dance, slept on the floor, ate nothing, waitressed - and then there was a Mary J. Blige audition.
Laurieann Gibson
#69. Well, I took ballet for many, many years, so my whole childhood really revolved around dance class. I grew up around dance; my mother was a dancer.
Amy Sherman-Palladino
#70. I don't really dance for pleasure much." "Uh
so you, uh, usually dance professionally, or what?" Seb asked. "Yeah," said Nick. "The ballet is my passion.
Sarah Rees Brennan
#71. I got the part [in Into the Forest], I started taking ballet again to try to regain my strength back. I actually love that it was changed to Crystal Pite's modern dance. And I wouldn't even really call it modern dance because it feels like it's in its own genre.
Evan Rachel Wood
#72. I made the sympathetic face, and the interested face, and even the impressed face. I did not say, 'In the name of all that is holy, cease this incessant drivel, you pretentious ass.
Meg Howrey
#73. Ballet is important and significant - yes. But first of all, it is a pleasure.
George Balanchine
#74. A gracefully effortless floating, flowing and flying are the essentials of the ballet's image of man.
Ayn Rand
#75. There are shortcuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.
Vicki Baum
#76. We act as a conduit for the observers' unexpressed desires, the silent appreciation they may contain for anything; a lover, a river, a building even
Guy Mankowski
#77. I did grow up in France, and even though I didn't go to the school or dance with the Paris Opera Ballet, I absorbed similar ideas in my training. I understand the scale of a big company. I danced for one for almost 20 years.
Benjamin Millepied
#78. There are those who dance the notes, and those who dance the music.
Eva Ibbotson
#79. I don't think much of a dance step where the girl looks like she was being carried out of a burning building.
Frank Hubbard
#80. My favorite workouts are the ones that don't feel like I'm working out! So, dance is a big one. Another is any kind of isolated moves, like ballet moves. Anything that works the glutes and legs - sign me up! And I like to blast the music. I have to get lost in the music. That helps.
Sarah Shahi
#81. Dancing is creating a sculpture that is visible only for a moment.
Erol Ozan
#82. I started dancing ballet when I was very young, so my background really is dance. But I remember loving the feeling of being on a stage and having a love for performing from a young age.
Caroline Sunshine
#83. You consider me for a moment, perhaps balancing the weight of your fear against the loneliness you will later feel in your room if you do not speak now
Guy Mankowski
#84. At 35 years of age, I realized that my ballet career wasn't going to last for ever. As a parent of three young children, I had to start to plan my future after dance even though I dreaded about.
Li Cunxin
#85. Ballet is more than a profession - it is a way of life.
Margot Fonteyn
#86. I was really creative. I started to dance very young. I loved to dance. I begged my mother to put me into dance classes, and finally, in third grade, she did. Tap and jazz, but not ballet.
Laverne Cox
#87. I used to dance when I was younger - ballet and modern dance.
Nastassja Kinski
#88. It [ballet] projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision.
Ayn Rand
#89. I love dancing and practiced ballet for ten years until I realized I wouldn't make it professionally - then I started taking salsa classes. I learned to dance samba in Rio and Salvador when I lived in Brazil.
Leila Janah
#90. If I'm at a party, I can put on some crazy dance moves. However, it's not synchronized, beautiful or choreographed like a ballet dancer. I'd love to be graceful like that.
Sierra McCormick
#91. Degas was obsessed by the art of classical ballet, because to him it said something about the human condition. He was not a balletomane looking for an alternative world to escape into. Dance offered him a display in which he could find, after much searching, certain human secrets.
John Berger
#92. I've been with Semperoper Ballet in Dresden, Germany, for five years - I wanted to escape the competitive dance world and go somewhere where I felt appreciated for my talents. Stateside, it was always kind of a struggle. And the competition? Not into it.
Sarah Hay
#93. One of the few things in dance to match the Royal Ballet's curtain calls is the Royal Ballet's dancing.
Clive Barnes
#94. I wasn't a ballet baby. My first dance class was in an outdoor pavilion when I was three. It was called 'creative movement.' The teacher gave us chiffon scarves in beautiful colors. She turned on some music and said, 'Now go dance.' So for me, dance has always been about self-expression.
Carrie Ann Inaba
#95. Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.
W. H. Auden
#96. I wanted to give people - which is fairly bizarre considering my whole life is contemporary dance really - I wanted to give people a really fulfilling sense that they had seen a white classical ballet - in a very pure form.
Graeme Murphy
#97. It [ballet] is a perfect medium for the expression of spiritual love.
Ayn Rand
#98. If nobody comes to your shows, then it's modern dance. If everybody comes to your shows and no one likes it, is that ballet? I don't know.
Mark Morris
#99. Ballet: men wearing pants so tight that you can tell what religion they are.
Robin Williams
#100. I did tap dancing and stuff like that at drama school. I did ballet as well. My dance teacher and I didn't necessarily get along all that well sometimes. She's brilliant ... but it's just because I don't like wearing tights that I put up a bit of a fight there, I think.
Tom Weston-Jones
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