These Ballet quotes will inspire you. Ballet is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, knowledgeable, and encouraging Ballet quotes, Ballet sayings, and Ballet proverbs.
Best Ballet Quotes
- “The more you lose yourself in something bigger than yourself, the more energy you will have.” ~ Norman Vincent Peale
- “Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.” ~ Charles Baudelaire
- “Ballet is a dance executed by the human soul.” ~ Alexander Pushkin
- “The ballet needs to tell its own story in such a way it can be received without having to be translated into language.” ~ Twyla Tharp
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“Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.” ~ Martha Graham
- “Dancers are the athletes of God.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “The domain of the ballet dancer is not earth but air.” ~ Lincoln Kirstein
- “You go to the ballet and you see girls dancing on their tiptoes. Why don’t they just get taller girls?” ~ Greg Ray , Ballet quotes little girl
- “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.” ~ Neve Campbell
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“If you wanna dance, a windshield wiper’ll do it-all you need is a beat.” ~ Artie Shaw
- “People who leave Washington do so by way of the box… ballet or coffin.” ~ Clay Pell
- “The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.” ~ Agnes de Mille
- “Classical ballet will never die.” ~ Ninette de Valois
- “It is not a question of skimming the surface of the art, it must be probed to its depths, for to seize upon superficial things only is to degenerate into mediocrity and obscurity.” ~ Jean-Georges Noverre
- “The defects born of habit are innumerable. I see every child occupied in some way in disarranging and disfiguring his physique; some displace the ankles through the habit they have contracted of standing on one leg only and playing, as it were, with the other; placing it in a position which though disagreeable and strained, does not fatigue them, because the softness of their tendons and muscles lend themselves to all kinds of movement.” ~ Jean-Georges Noverre
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“Come knit hands, and beat the ground in a light fantastic round” ~ John Milton
- “And then he danced,-all foreigners excel the serious Angels in the eloquence of pantomime;-he danced, I say, right well, with emphasis, and a’so with good sense-a thing in footing indispensable: he danced without theatrical pretence, not like a ballet-master in the van of his drill’d nymphs, but like a gentleman.” ~ Lord Byron
- “I’m enamored with the art world. 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.” ~ Steve Martin
- “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.'” ~ Rita Rudner
- “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 , Ballet quotes dance & life
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“Ballet is only good when it is great.” ~ Arlene Croce
- “Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.” ~ Martha Graham
- “Some people think that movements, such as the movements in ballet, are a higher cultural expression, whereas some are just dirt. I think it is elitist to think that a trained movement is more acceptable than untrained and possibly unrehearsed movements.” ~ Yoko Ono
- “When I was a little kid, I took tap and ballet. I’ve always loved to dance. I’m a rhythm machine.” ~ Tommy Lee
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“Applause lavished at a whim and without discernment, often proves the ruin of young people training for a stage career.” ~ Jean-Georges Noverre
- “I cannot avoid condemning all those who, from self-conceit have the pretension to imitate great artists of the past. If their powers of emotion be weak, their powers of expression will be likewise.” ~ Jean-Georges Noverre
- “At our theaters we only see feeble copies of the copies that have proceeded them, renounce that slavish routine which keeps your art in its infancy; examine everything relative to the development of talents; be original; form a style for yourselves based on your private studies; if you must copy, imitate nature, it is a noble model and never misleads those who follow it.” ~ Jean-Georges Noverre
- “If our ballets be feeble, monotonous and dull, if they be devoid of ideas, meaning, expression and character, it is less the fault of the art than that of the artist.” ~ Jean-Georges Noverre
- “The defect in wisdom and taste which exists among the majority of dancers is due to the bad education which they generally receive. They apply themselves only to the material side of their art, they learn to jump more or less high, they strive mechanically to execute a number of steps, and like children, who utter a great many words devoid of sense and relation, they execute many phrases of steps devoid of taste and grace.” ~ Jean-Georges Noverre
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“It is shameful that dancing should renounce the empire it might assert over the mind and only endeavor to please the sight.” ~ Jean-Georges Noverre
- “No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.” ~ Mikhail Baryshnikov
- “The real American type can never be a ballet dancer. The legs are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too free for this school of affected grace and toe walking.” ~ Isadora Duncan
- “Dance is very, very old. With Louis XIV at Versailles is where ballet started.” ~ Neve Campbell
- “I toured the Middle Eastern countries with the ballet.” ~ Leslie Caron
- “I never went to a ballet until I was 45 years old. I don’t know why.” ~ Robert Caro
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“I grew up in the theater and danced ballet atrociously.” ~ Maureen O’Hara
- “I used to dance when I was younger – ballet and modern dance.” ~ Nastassja Kinski
- “In the Thirties, when I was in New York, I did the first surrealistic ballet in a show of mine.” ~ Vincente Minnelli
- “I started taking ballet lessons when I was three and a half and I still take dance classes.” ~ Oksana Baiul
- “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
- “Mum, who had been a dancer with a small ballet company before she got married, was full of encouragement. She didn’t say, “This is really good, you should do this”, She just encouraged us to do whatever we liked.” ~ Dannii Minogue
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“I am both proud and honored to be on the Board of Directors for the Texas Ballet Theater.” ~ Janine Turner
- “And it is always Easter Sunday at the New York City Ballet. It is always coming back to life. Not even coming back to life – it lives in the constant present.” ~ John Guare
- “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
- “I went away when I was 9 to a ballet school. I thought I wanted to be a dancer, but eight years of ballet cured me of that.” ~ Juliet Mills
- “The particular ballet was not so important as the fact that I was physically healthy, and capable of getting out there and dancing as often as possible.” ~ Suzanne Farrell
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“I went to the Performing Arts School and studied classical ballet. That attitude is something that’s put into your head. You are never thin enough.” ~ Carmen Electra
- “Everything seems to be going faster and faster. It’s really harder to create something that endures. The New York City Ballet has succeeded in doing that.” ~ Robert Caro
- “You can’t drink on an eight hour flight, pass out, and then go onstage… well you can, but then you’re Spandau Ballet.” ~ Robert Smith
- “I think that every year that the New York City Ballet is alive is worthy of celebration. Because otherwise the terrible thing is just that we take it for granted.” ~ John Guare
- “The New York City Ballet is obviously speaking to a whole new generation and bringing it the same wonder and beauty that it brought previous generations” ~ Robert Caro
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“I wanted to be a ballet teacher.” ~ Jaclyn Smith
- “I copied my brother. He was a natural dancer. Graceful. People always asked did we study ballet. We never did.” ~ Harold Nicholas
- “And what would be great numbers in a Broadway show are now on stage of the New York City Ballet.” ~ John Guare
- “I was a ballet dancer and that kind of bled into musical theater. I was constantly in rehearsal for one thing or another.” ~ Jennifer Garner
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“In fact, ballet companies did not exist in the Midwest when I was a child.” ~ Suzanne Farrell
- “The life of a dancer is tragically short. What is remarkable about the New York City Ballet is that it makes us forget that. Because it keeps the ballet alive.” ~ John Guare
- “Dancing is a tough career, but I’m glad I spent it at the Royal Ballet.” ~ Deborah Bull
- “Sometimes during a ballet I’ll look around and see all these rows of intent faces, concentrating on this beautiful thing up on the stage.” ~ Robert Caro
- “Ballet-girls have a bad reputation, which is in most cases well deserved” ~ Henry Mayhew
- “I think of the New York City Ballet as the Yankees without George Steinbrenner.” ~ John Guare
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“Does the New York City Ballet affect other places? Yeah, it lets people know they should come to New York.” ~ John Guare
- “I had to do a tango with Raft and I learned to dance in ballet shoes with my knees bent.” ~ Marie Windsor
- “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
- “Please send me your last pair of shoes, worn out with dancing as you mentioned in your letter, so that I might have something to press against my heart.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
