Top 100 Sayings About The Ballet
#1. Dancing is forbidden to Christians. Isn't it suggestive that the word ballet comes from the Greek ballo, which is also the origin of diabolos, "devil"?8
Peter J. Leithart
#2. The Internet, and the computers that made it possible, came from a rather dark place, much more missile than ballet, and they might yet return there. This book is about how and why that could happen, and what might be done about it.
Scott Malcomson
#3. My life isn't theories and formulae. It's part instinct, part common sense. Logic is as good a word as any, and I've absorbed what logic I have from everything and everyone ... from my mother, from training as a ballet dancer, from Vogue magazine, from the laws of life and health and nature.
Audrey Hepburn
#4. I was completely broke, so I started saying yes to everything. I said yes to a woman who approached me about shooting the Dracula ballet, even though I felt like I was probably going to sabotage it.
Guy Maddin
#5. I wanted to open the dialogue about race in ballet and bring more people in. It's just beautiful to see the interest that has exploded for such an incredible art form that I will forever be grateful to!
Misty Copeland
#6. 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
#9. My Mom is a ballet director, so I had this idea in me that classical training is the best foundation for anything you do, so I wanted to get a classical background and voice.
Shuler Hensley
#10. I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children's author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first woman president.
Rachel Corrie
#11. I went to ballet school for nine years, and there was an agent for the whole school who happened to be there visiting one of the performances. She suggested an audition.
Sarah Sutton
#12. I went to my mum at about seven or eight and said I want to start acting, but the week before, I had said I wanted to do ballet. She said if I took acting classes for a full year, she would look further into it, and that's how it started.
Hailee Steinfeld
#13. I can remember being very keen to go to drama school at the age of eight, and practising ballet in my bedroom to Queen soundtracks.
Carmen Ejogo
#14. Making the ballet really taught me how to get things moving. Ballet dancers don't stand still.
Guy Maddin
#15. A gracefully effortless floating, flowing and flying are the essentials of the ballet's image of man.
Ayn Rand
#16. A fine picture is but the image of nature; a finished ballet is nature herself.
Jean-Georges Noverre
#17. 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
#19. 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
#20. Since my mom is the President of Ballet Hawaii, I'm always in touch with stuff going on.
Joan Chen
#21. My parents have always given me whatever I wanted. Took me to the ballet, the opera, museum exhibitions. I was always surrounded by art. It's their fault I've become an actress.
Bar Paly
#22. 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
#23. '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.
Benjamin Millepied
#24. I had a really creative teacher at primary school. He used to get us doing things such as singing Spandau Ballet in drag in the choir, and I remember loving it.
Dominic Cooper
#25. Go figure a crazy, mixed-up country where ballet outsells boxing. I wouldn't be surprised if their wrestling was on the level.
Bob Hope
#26. Ballet pumps are the dream shoes because they are so comfortable. They look great both with jeans and summer dresses; and you can even wear the right pair with an evening gown.
Twiggy
#27. 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
#28. The deep art ... That's the part that has to be guarded like a miser would his money ... Like a dope addict would his dope ... Like a lover with their love.
Alonzo King
#29. Don't hold on to the barre like, 'I might die.' It's just ballet.
Misty Copeland
#30. When I've done gymnastics, ballet or soccer - I was always trying to be the best. I'm really driven. Really driven.
Chloe Grace Moretz
#31. 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
#32. I love going to see the theatre whether it's a Broadway play or a Russian ballet company.
Michael Ealy
#33. The highest heels I do are six-inch heels - but mostly only dancers can wear them, since they are used to being on point in ballet shoes. Their feet are arched.
Christian Louboutin
#34. I can see why they named that ballet the Nutcracker. It's gotta hurt having 'em crushed in something that tight.
Mark A. Cooper
#35. When Disney was creating Elsa, they based a lot of her movements on that of a ballerina, which was interesting for me to find out because I actually did ballet years ago. That definitely informed some of the ways I made her walk and move.
Georgina Haig
#36. 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
#37. One of the most beautiful sights in dance is American Ballet Theatre in full flight.
Clive Barnes
#38. The eternal and uneasy relationship between ballet and modern dance endures, but radically altered in tone and intensity.
Robert Gottlieb
#39. Ballet really lends itself to that because there's such a sense of ritual, with wrapping the shoes every day and preparing new shoes for every performance. It's such a process. It's almost religious, in nature.
Natalie Portman
#40. Ballet is not technique but a way of expression that comes more closely to the inner language of man than any other.
George Sava
#41. 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
#42. I think that I'm so fortunate to have found classical ballet. It completely changed my life and it shaped the person that I am today, on and off the stage.
Misty Copeland
#43. I think all dancers are control freaks a bit. We just want to be in control of ourselves and our bodies. That's just what the ballet structure, I think, kind of puts inside of you.
Misty Copeland
#44. Ballet is quite unnatural on the joints. My body is just worn. My joints are 10 years older than me.
Darcey Bussell
#45. When I started thinking seriously about learning the rules of narrative, I thought, 'You've learned the rules of dancing from the ballet; what's the matter with learning the laws of theater from the people who know how to do it?'
Twyla Tharp
#46. 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
#47. I've danced since I was 5 and went to the School of American Ballet at Lincoln Center at 7.
Sarah Hay
#48. 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 whole shape of the work. I do not believe in the permanence of anything in ballet save the purely classical.
George Balanchine
#49. The bulk of life on Earth lives in a peaceful place where the temperature is stable. There's hunting going on, but it's very civilized, like a slow ballet.
Graham Hawkes
#50. Somewhere in there the grace of a ballet dancer joins with the strength of an SAS squaddie, the dignity of an ancient kind, the nerve of a bomb disposal officer ...
Eamon Dunphy
#51. 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
#52. I hated the ballet, but I liked performing. I did 20 shows, and I couldn't get the smile off my face.
Ansel Elgort
#53. 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
#54. An ex-ABT ballerina, while staging a ballet for the company, once followed a dancer into the bathroom to deliver notes through the stall door. She was known to bark - literally, like a dog - during private rehearsals.
Sascha Radetsky
#55. It takes a lot of money to be a part of the ballet world. Both the training and the supplies are expensive, the shoes, the leotards and the tights.
Misty Copeland
#56. At age 14, coming to the U.S., all I knew was American Ballet Theatre, Baryshnikov, Nureyev, and some of the European companies. I barely knew anything about Balanchine.
Carla Korbes
#57. Applause lavished at a whim and without discernment, often proves the ruin of young people training for a stage career.
Jean-Georges Noverre
#58. 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
#59. I was embarrassed that I even wanted to become an actress because coming from L.A., with two older sisters in the business and a mom who had been a ballet dancer, it was such a cliche.
Elizabeth Olsen
#60. I think that ballet is very good for the body. It's very similar to yoga, because you have to hold a position.
Carine Roitfeld
#61. Spectacular sporting events are bread & circuses. The Superbowl, for instance, is anything but "super". It is a Petri dish under the lens of mediaocrity, where surveillance of the spectators is just as mind numbing as the incomprehensible homo-erotic beefcake ballet being enacted on the pitch
Dean Cavanagh
#62. I remember vividly seeing 'Tarzan' and Fred Astaire, the Chaplin films, Fred Astaire musicals, MGM, because of my mother. She was just interested in everything and she took me to opera and ballet, and then ballet got me hooked.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
#63. By disparaging ballet he succeeded very well in convincing the boys that ballet was not for Americans, that it was European in origin and in continuing character.
Walter Terry
#64. I don't feel like my life is that of a superstar! Every day I wake up, I take the train, I go to my ballet class. My everyday life is pretty normal.
Misty Copeland
#65. I toured the Middle Eastern countries with the ballet.
Leslie Caron
#66. I didn't know if I could act, but I knew I could be a great ballet dancer, and Balanchine put out the carpet for me.
Jacques D'Amboise
#67. I'd say the only time I ever get nervous is around great ballet dancers or people I really admire.
Dita Von Teese
#68. You go to the ballet and you see girls dancing on their tiptoes. Why don't they just get taller girls?
Greg Ray
#69. 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
#70. On the other hand, I think it is wonderful for everyone to take ballet classes, at any age. It gives you a discipline, it gives you a place to go. It gives you some control in your life.
Suzanne Farrell
#71. The first show I did was 'The Nutcracker' ballet. I was one of the kids who comes out in the beginning.
Ansel Elgort
#72. Come knit hands, and beat the ground in a light fantastic round
John Milton
#73. Writing used to be my hobby, but now that it's my job, I have no hobby - except watching TV and laying around the pool reading 'U.S. Weekly.' I have tried many hobbies, such as knitting, Pilates, ballet, yoga, and guitar, but none of them have taken.
Meg Cabot
#74. Rather than opera, football is more like ballet or a chess game. You can really see it in a team like Arsenal, especially when Dennis Bergkamp was playing. He seemed to be able to read the game like a chessboard and knew where a player would be several seconds later and put the ball there for him.
Marcus Du Sautoy
#75. Ballet is not just movement, not simply abstract. It's something beautiful. Sometimes there's this feeling in the movement that makes me want to cry.
Nina Ananiashvili
#76. Tolstoy may be right about happy and unhappy families, but in ballet, it works the opposite way: All good ballets are different from each other and all bad ones are alike, at least in one crucial respect - they're all empty.
Robert Gottlieb
#77. Most dancers have no awareness of how they look; half of them think they're fat. There is anorexia in the ballet world; there are those things.
Benjamin Millepied
#78. It [ballet] is a perfect medium for the expression of spiritual love.
Ayn Rand
#79. American Ballet Theatre's rehearsal studios are at 890 Broadway, an old building where exposed pipes clank and hiss in uneven accompaniment to piano music. The high ceilings wear a toupee of dust. The wall paint peels like a newbie ballerina's toes.
Sascha Radetsky
#80. Ballet is certainly appreciated in New York, but it has been a part of the Russian culture, history and heritage for hundreds of years, so it's much more instilled in the Russian blood.
David Hallberg
#81. 'The Nutcracker' is the ballet that keeps on giving.
David H. Koch
#82. In France, ballet is on TV ... It's on the eight-o'clock news. It's a cool thing to be a dancer.
Benjamin Millepied
#83. Once you become a professional, to get through a ballet like 'Swan Lake' - four acts as the lead, changing character - the perseverance is incredible. It takes a lot to make it through and keep the same energy throughout the entire performance.
Misty Copeland
#84. 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
#85. The woman represents ballet. She is most important, powerful and vital to it. Therefore, she is not "less than" a man. If anything she is "more than" in this field.
Misty Copeland
#86. I take ballet class as often as possible - up to 5 times a week - and try to go to the gym on the days that I don't take class. I also do a floor barre/Pilates mat class almost everyday.
Amanda Schull
#87. One of the few things in dance to match the Royal Ballet's curtain calls is the Royal Ballet's dancing.
Clive Barnes
#88. The music industry is so easy compared to the ballet world.
Vanessa Carlton
#89. 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
#90. I wake up every morning, and I go to ballet class no matter what's going on the night before. That's my priority, and that's what makes me feel sane and not removed from the realities of my world.
Misty Copeland
#91. The first good player I watched as a kid was Joe DiMaggio, and that was like ballet. Since then, I played sandlot and college ball and came to understand how difficult it can be.
Mario Cuomo
#92. I dreamt of becoming a ballet dancer. I studied with the Royal Academy of London for 11 years, and that did not pan out, but my love for being on stage was born there. And then, I actually went to drama school in Paris, France. That's where it first started.
Diane Kruger
#93. All my scripts have artistic backgrounds
ballet, concert hall, opera
and all the suspects and corpses are cultured, maybe I'll do one about the rare book business in your honor, do you want to be the murderer or the corpse?
Helene Hanff
#94. 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
#95. I was a protege; by the age of 10, I was studying with ballet choreographer Anthony Tudor in a class of adults.
Judith Jamison
#96. What is true of ballet is no less true of the other lively arts. Change is built into their natures. You watch a performance, and then ... it's gone.
Terry Teachout
#97. At the ballet classes I took when I first came to New York, I would see great dancers like Cynthia Gregory and Lupe Serrano. I would look at them and study what they could do, and what I couldn't do. And then I'd think maybe they should try what I could do.
Twyla Tharp
#98. Since babyhood, I've always evolved from one thing to another. My mother gave me ballet lessons at 6 as part of her enthusiasm for the arts and for life. We went to museums, to the theater. While her own talent was untapped, she worked for church causes.
Judith Jamison
#99. Instead of watching cartoons when I was little, I had Russian ballet videos from, like, the 1950s and 1940s.
Sarah Hay
#100. Clearly, the pleasures wines afford are transitory - but so are those of the ballet, or of a musical performance. Wine is inspiring and adds greatly to the joy of living.
Napoleon Bonaparte
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