George Balanchine Quotes

34 quotes in 372 categories

• Most ballet teachers in the United States are terrible. If they were in medicine, everyone would be poisoned.
• One is born to be a great dancer.
• The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.
• 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…
• The pointes for girls, I always say, have to be like an elephant's trunk; strong and yet flexible and soft.
• I cannot move, I cannot even want to move, unless I hear the music first.
• They are poets of gesture.
• Ballet will speak for itself. About itself.
• 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…
• Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policeman, always alert, always tense. But i dont agree with that because policeman don't have…
• See the music, hear the dance.
• 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…
• I don't want people who want to dance; I want people who have to dance
• 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…
• Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.
• What are you waiting for? What are you saving for? Now is all there is.
• I am a cloud - in trousers.
• Dance is music made visible
• The mirror is not you. The mirror is you looking at yourself.
• One is born to be a dancer. No teacher can work miracles, nor will years of training make a good dancer of an untalented pupil.…

Browse George Balanchine Quotes by Category