Ballet Quotes - Page 2

A pas de deux is a dialogue of love. How can there be conversation if one partner is dumb?

Whenever I have had a sudden urge to quit dancing, I just remember that moment I had when I was young and remember that dancing is what I want to do.

What's so wonderful about ballet is that it's mind-driven physicality. It's almost a Greek ideal of body, mind, and form.

Even the ears must dance.

You're never more of an individual than when you're a happy team player.

I started taking ballet lessons when I was 4, and I was performing in ballet companies when I was 10, and I did summer stock in Miami Beach when I was 12, and finally I said, 'I gotta go to Broadway.'

I am not an educated person. I didn't come up through a ballet company. I came up through burlesque. So I have a lot of inferiority feelings concerning my own lack of education, my entry into show business. I'm not a Baryshnikov. I'm not a Nureyev. I came up in vaudeville. Strippers. So I've always had these feelings. But I think they've also helped me.

Russian culture is multifaceted and diverse. So if you want to understand, to feel Russia, then of course you need to read books, Tolstoy and Chekhov and Gogol and others. Listen to music. Tchaikovsky. Watch our classical ballet. But the most important thing is that you need to talk with people.

Get my swan costume ready.

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.

We must never forget that the dance is the cradle of Negro music.

At the ballet, you really feel like you're in the presence of something outside the rest of your life. Higher than the rest of your life.

Dancing is the poetry of the foot.

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.

Ballet is completely unnatural to the body, just being turned out... it's not the way your body is supposed to function, so you actually [...] train your body to be a different structure than you were born with.

Ballet is more than a profession - it is a way of life.

I love ballet. Ballet is its own being. It has its own vocabulary. I feel as if I am in a different world when I am in the ballet studio.

Dancing is the body made poetic.

Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

The purpose of art is higher than art. What we are really interested in are masterpieces of humanity.

Ballet.something pure in this crazy world

The artistic path is a fearless occupation.

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.

You cannot create genius. All you can do is nurture it.

Minor things can become moments of great revelation when encountered for the first time.