Dance Quotes

Dance Quotes

We have compiled an extensive collection of dance quotes specifically for dancers.  Many of our dance quotes have been from great dance masters, educators, and choreographers such as Martha Graham, Suzanne Farrell, Twyla Tharp, Alonzo King and Rudolph Nureyev.  Other dance quotes from our vast collection have been from philosophers, historians and writers like Plato, Abraham Lincoln, Confucius and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche from many, generations ago.  Many of our dance quotes have been used over the years with “source unknown” and some dance quotes have come from dancers like you.

Regardless of where the dance quotes arrived from, we are sure you will experience and sense many different emotions.  We hope some will inspire you, some motivate you, some may even make you weep and many will bring you joy, laughter and the sense of fulfillment.  Other dance quotes might change the way you think, open up your mind and body to new possibilities.  With over 500 dance quotes, a wide range of emotions will be felt.

We have made it possible to be able to Tweet all our dance quotes for your convenience so you can share with your friends and followers.

We would love to hear from you.  Let us know what your favorite dance quote is.  If we have missed any quotes, please click here and submit.  Please don’t forget the author, if at all possible.  We also have a PDF version of our wide range of dance quotes you can print and have one hand.  You will be able to highlight your favorites and look back for future reference.

We hope our dance quotes are examples, which will stay in your minds and hearts and inspire you and remind you of who we are and what we can be.

A brand-new pair of toe shoes presents itself to us as an enemy with a will of its own that must be tamed. Toni Bentley

A child sings before it speaks, dances almost before it walks. Music is in our hearts from the beginning. Pamela Brown

A couple of hours after Sunset Michael Robartes returned and told me that I would have to learn the steps of an exceedingly antique dance, because before my initiation could be perfected I had to join three times in a magical dance, for rhythm was the wheel of Eternity, on which alone the transient and accidental could be broken, and the spirit set free. W.B. Yeats

A creative person has to create. It doesn’t really matter what you create. If such a dancer wanted to go out and build the cactus gardens where he could, in Mexico, let him do that, but something that is creative has to go on. Katherine Dunham

A dance is a measured pace, as a verse is a measured speech. Francis Bacon

A dance legacy must be performed in order to be preserved. Ann Daly

A dance performance is rather like going out into a battlefield. You have to hold the attention of as many as five to 10,000 people a lot of whom do not follow your language. Yamini Krishnamurthy

A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths: the first, the physical when the powerfully trained body will no longer respond as you would wish. After all, I choreographed for myself. I never choreographed what I could not do. I changed steps in Medea and other ballets to accommodate the change. But I knew. And it haunted me. I only wanted to dance. Martha Graham

A dancer’s body is her temple.”Paulette Rees-Denis

A day I don’t dance is a day I don’t live. Source Unknown

A fine picture is but the image of nature; a finished ballet is nature herself. J.G. Noverre

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

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

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

A real ballerina must fill her space with her own personality.  Natalia Makarova

A star danced, and under that was I born.  William Shakespeare

A toe shoe is an eccentric as the ballerina who wears it: their marriage is a commitment.  Toni Bentley

A weak first step transmits nothing.  Mai Kishikawa

After I stopped dancing, I was unable to listen to beautiful music. Suzanne Farrell

All dance has expression. If there is no expression, I prefer the circus. The performers do more dangerous, more difficult technical things than we do. But we are dancers. We have to express and we have to project. Luis Fuente

All I ever needed was the music and the mirror. A Chorus Line

All that music and only two feet.  Source Unknown

All the gestures of children are graceful; the reign of distortion and unnatural attitudes commences with the introduction of the dancing master.  Sir Joshua Reynolds

Although we do come from a silent profession, it is important for us to verbalize what we want to say. (As I tell my students):  you could love someone all your life, but if you never say it how are they going to know?  There comes a point when you have to say what you mean, which makes you scream louder when you dance.  Suzanne Farrell

An art process in not essentially a natural process; it is an invented one.  It can take actions of organization from the way nature functions, but essentially man invents the process.  And from or for that process he derives a discipline to make and keep the process functioning.  That discipline too is not a natural process.  The daily discipline, the continued keeping of the elasticity of the muscles, the continued control of the mind over the body’s actions, the constant hoped for flow of the spirit into physical movement, both new and renewed, is not a natural way.  It is unnatural in its demands on all the sources of energy.  But the final synthesis can be a natural one, natural in the sense that the mind, body and spirit function as one.  Merce Cunningham

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.  Nietzsche

And when they ask you, ‘what is your church?’ you say, ‘I dance.  Source Unknown

Anna Pavlova was looking at her swan costume as she was dying.  Her final words:  “Get my swan costume ready.  Anna Pavlova

Any problem in the world can be solved by dancing.  James Brown

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

Anyone who says sunshine brings happiness has never danced in the rain.  Source Unknown

Applause lavished at a whim and without discernment, often proves the ruin of young people training for a stage career.  J.G. Noverre

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.  Edgar Degas

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.  Twyla Tharp

As soon as I hear music, something in me starts to vibrate.  Suzanne Farrell

As the sun began to rise, the man reached out to the woman, and they clasped hands.  He cradled her, and languidly they lifted themselves up to their feet, their bodies brushing, their eyes lost in each other’s.  Sensuously, deliberately, they danced, moving as though they were one, their body language smooth as their limbs carefully unfolded.  They twirled and rocked, intertwined and separated, nearly leaning onto one another but barely touching, their movements sometimes tender, sometimes almost violent…Moments passed while the dancers held tight to each other, as though their bodies were melting together.  The expression on their features as they lifted their faces to the sky was one of unimaginable joy.  Hannah Fielding

As we rise higher in the understanding of ourselves, the national and racial dissonances will be forgotten in the universal rhythms of Truth and Love.  Ruth St. Denis

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.  J.G. Noverre

Ballet class is like Life Lessons 101.  You learn some of life’s most important lessons here that you will carry with you forever.  Joanne H. Morscher

Ballet dancers always have a POINTE!  Source Unknown

Ballet dancing is arduous, strenuous activity.  Students are engaged in physical training that rivals the training Olympic athletes undergo.  At the same time, they strive for physical perfection not for the prowess alone but as a way of achieving the means necessary to express the pure nature of their art.  George Balanchine

Ballet is a dance executed by the human soul.  Alexander Pushkin

Ballet is important and significant – yes.  But first of all, it is a pleasure.  George Balanchine

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

Ballet is not technique but a way of expression that comes more closely to the inner language of man than any other.  George Borodin

Ballet is only good when it is great.  Arlene Croce

Ballet is the one form of theater where nobody speaks a foolish word all evening, nobody on the stage at least.  Edwin Denby

Ballet technique is arbitrary and very difficult. It never becomes easy; it becomes possible.  Agnes De Mille

Basic dance, and I should qualify the word basic, is primarily concerned with motion. So immediately you will say but the basketball player is concerned with motion. That is so–but he is not concerned with it primarily. His action is a means towards an end beyond motion.  In basic dance the motion is its own end, that is, it is concerned with nothing beyond itself.  Alwin Nikolais

Be guided.  Face what you don’t know and allow those who do to help you reach your full artistic potential.  There are no great talents out there who are fully evolved and developed without understanding the history, tradition, philosophy, behaviors, and relationships pertaining to their particular artistic expression.  You can’t just rely on the audience loving you because you do wonderful tours In the air.  That’s great, really great, but all of that has to be networked with all the other aspects of the art form.  So often we have brilliant talents who show us their brilliance but never achieve the artistry.  Edward Villella

Be in it. Get drunk in the moment.  Alonzo King

Be like a branch of a tree; flex your body to face ‘wind of sorrow’; flex little harder to dance in the ‘wind of happiness’.  Santosh Kalwar

Beginning dancers prefer to take “intermediate” level classes.  Intermediate dancers prefer to take “advanced” level classes.  Advanced dancers take private lessons to work on their basics.  Source Unknown

Birds use their wings to fly, because they do not know how to dance. Zeynep Okcu

Bleeding feet will bond us.  Liza Minelli

Bravura has nothing to do with technique.  It’s all about timing and oozing life.  Kevin McKenzie

But in reality we are accompanied by the whole dancing universe.  Ruth St. Denis

Choreography is simpler than you think.  Just go and do, and don’t think so much about it.  Just make something interesting.  George Balanchine

Classical dancing is like being a mother:  if you’ve never done it, you can’t imagine how hard it is.  Harriet Cavalli

Classical language and musicality are not simply effete traditions belonging to the bygone upper classes.  The vocabulary and manner of classical ballet express a high order of discipline and restraint, a sense of harmony with forces larger and more lasting than the individual.  Marsha B. Siegel

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds.  A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. William James

Common sense would tell parents never to send their children to a ballet school.  Common sense would tell teenagers that there is a wider and happier world beyond the grueling strictures of daily barre and class.  Common sense would tell the graduating student that there are infinitely superior ways of making money than joining a professional ballet company.  Common sense would tell a young dancer that very few (laughably few) of his or her colleagues will ever make it to the top or even near the top.  Yet… there remains the dance and the dancer.  Author Unknown

Consciousness expresses itself through creation.  This world we live in is the dance of the creator.  Dancers come and go in the twinkling of an eye but the dance lives on.  On many an occasion when I am dancing, I have felt touched by something sacred.  In those moments, I felt my spirit soar and become one with everything that exists.  I become the stars and the moon.  I become the lover and the beloved.  I become the victor and the vanquished.  I become the master and the slave.  I become the singer and the song.  I become the knower and the known.  I keep on dancing then it is the eternal dance or creation.  The creator and creation merge into one wholeness of joy.  I keep on dancing…and dancing…and dancing.  Until there is only…the dance.  Michael Jackson

Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes.  Art is knowing which ones to keep.  Scott Adams

Dance – an art form.  The body – an instrument.  Learn to play the instrument and master the art form.  Debbie Dee

Dance can give the inarticulate a voice.  Pamela Brown

Dance every performance as if it were your last.   Erik Bruhn

Dance first. Think later.  It’s the natural order.  Samuel Beckett

Dance for yourself. If someone else understands, good. If not, no matter. Go right on doing what interests you, and do it until it stops interesting you.  Louis Horst

Dance from your heart and love your music, and the audience will love you in return.  Maria Tallchief

Dance has to unfold with the grace of a tree giving out leaves, flowers and then tiny fruit.  Nothing so beautiful can be done in haste.  Pt. Birju Maharaj

Dance helps us dream bigger dreams and understand our connectedness.  When we close our eyes and dream, we are all brothers.  Russell Clark

Dance in the most perishable of the arts.  Ballets are forgotten, ballerinas retire, choreographers die, and what remains of that glorious production which so excited us a decade ago, a year ago, or even last night?  Jack Anderson

Dance involves every possible feeling (as potential), because it is of the body, which is lived (inescapably) as a body of feeling.  Some of these feelings we can name, and some we cannot, since we associate feelings with language only when we name them.  The body lives sentience on a preverbal level.  Dance exists first on this primordial level, not on an intellectual plane (even though it requires skill and intelligence).  Its inmost substance cannot be reasoned, only experienced.  Sondra Horton Fraleigh

Dance is a delicate balance between perfection and beauty.  Source Unknown

Dance is a little insanity that does us all a lot of good.  Edward Demby

Dance is a song of the body.  Either of joy or pain.  Martha Graham

Dance is an art that imprints on the soul.  It is with you every moment, it expresses itself in everything you do.  Shirley MacLaine

Dance is an art, paint your dream and follow it.  Steven Thompson

Dance is bigger than the physical body.  Think bigger than that.  When you extend your arm, it doesn’t stop at the end of your fingers, because you’re dancing bigger than that – your dancing spirit.  Judith Jamison

Dance is communication, and so the great challenge is to speak clearly, beautifully, and with inevitability.  Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.  Dancing is like dreaming with your feet!  Constanze

Dance is for everybody.  I believe that the dance came from the people and that it should always be delivered back to the people.  Alvin Ailey

Dance is joy.  Dance s love.  Dance is what dreams are made of.  Source Unknown

Dance is life, the rest is just rehearsal!  Source Unknown

Dance is like wine it matures with every performance.  Alarmel Valli

Dance is music made visible.  George Balanchine

Dance is so important in the world, it needs no language.  Our bodies speak a language of its own.  Ibrahim Farrah

Dance is something that you do, not something you talk about.  It’s abstract and emotional.  Art comes from a private, hidden, never fully understood place.  You lose yourself in it.  You become one with the music; it’s godlike; it’s spiritual.  To talk about it is to trespass in a restricted zone.  Donna McKenzie

Dance is the art form; the body is the instrument.  Learn to play the instrument so you can master the art form.  Debbie Dee

Dance is the hidden language of the soul.  Martha Graham

Dance is the loftiest, most moving, most beautiful of the arts, because it is not a mere translation or abstraction of life; it is life itself!  Martha Graham

Dance is the movement of the universe concentrated in an individual. Isadora Duncan

Dance is the only art in which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.  Ted Shawn

Dance is the song of the body.  Martha Graham

Dance is your pulse, your heartbeat, your breathing.  It’s the rhythm of your life.  It’s the expression in time and movement, in happiness, joy, sadness and envy.  Jacques d’Amboise

Dance isn’t just about fancy footwork.  It requires grace, discipline, and major muscles.  Source Unknown

Dance isn’t something that can be explained in words.  It has to be danced.  Paige Arden

Dance like there’s nobody watching, love like you’ll never be hurt.  Sing like there’s nobody listening, and live like it’s heaven on earth.  William W. Purkey

Dance till the stars come down from the rafters, dance, dance, dance till you drop.  W.H. Auden

Dance to express, not to impress.  Source Unknown

Dance today is clearly in an unsettled state.  Old forms and traditions are being given up.  New ones are arising to take their place.  A time of change presents a confused picture.  That there is change is proof that dance is organically vital, and much more so than it has ever before been in this country.  Margaret H’Doubler

Dance, dance, dance till you drop.  W. H. Auden

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.  Kurt Vonnegut

Dance, in its broadest sense, is a physical acknowledgment of the rhythm of the universe and of our own lives.  Carol Roan

Dance, one of the oldest forms of artistic expression, requires only the human body for its realization.  Igor Youskevitch

Dance, when you’re broken open.  Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.  Dance in the middle of the fighting.  Dance in your blood.  Dance when you’re perfectly free.  Rumi

Dancers always win!  Source Unknown

Dancers are a great breed of people. And they really want to dance so you don’t have to beg them to work.  However, dancers sometimes build walls around themselves because they are presenting themselves all the time:  dancing is very much a confession.  Suzanne Farrell

Dancers are among the most passionate and dedicated of artists and rarely take their work for granted.  Source Unknown

Dancers are athletes of God.  Albert Einstein

Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.  George Balanchine

Dancers are the messengers of the gods.  Martha Graham

Dancers have a very hard job.  We must take our ugly, callused, blistered, and bruised feet and present them in a way so that they are mistaken as the most beautiful things on Earth.  Source Unknown

Dancers offer us our only earthly chance to catch a glimpse of the angelic host.  Source Unknown

Dancers turn out better!  Source Unknown

Dancers work and live from the inside.  They drive themselves constantly producing a glow that lights not only themselves but audience after audience.  M. Louis

Dancing allows me to explore myself in so many ways, to learn about my limitations and strengths, my ability to cope with adversity and to go farther than I thought I could.  You find out what you’re made of.  Andrew Asnes

Dancing and ballets would undoubtedly take on a new lease on life, if the customs established by a spirit of fear and jealousy did not in some way close the path of glory…  J.G. Noverre

Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful.  But the path to paradise of the achievement is not easier than any other.  There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep.  There are times of complete frustration, there are daily small deaths.  Martha Graham

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.  Mikhail Baryshnikov

Dancing faces you towards Heaven, whichever direction you turn.  Terri Guillemets

Dancing gets on your brain and makes you crazy, but it’s a good crazy, like love.  Source Unknown

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?  Friedrich Nietzsche

Dancing is a sweat job.  Fred Astaire

Dancing is a very living art.  It is essentially of the moment, although a very old art.  A dancer’s art is lived while he is dancing.  Nothing is left of his art except the pictures and the memories, when his dancing days are over.  Martha Graham

Dancing is an art because it is subject to rules.  Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire

Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery.  Martha Graham

Dancing is like bank robbery, it takes split-second timing.  Twyla Tharp

Dancing is like breathing – missing a day doing either is very bad.  Vera Ellen

Dancing is like dreaming with your feet!  Constanze

Dancing is like life:  it’s good to have a plan, but be prepared to improvise.  Source Unknown

Dancing is moving to the music without stepping on anyone’s toes, pretty much the same as life.  Robert Brault

Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.  Charles Baudelaire

Dancing is silent poetry.  Simonides

Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression.  Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience.  Poetry and music exist in time.  Painting and architecture are a part of space.  But only the dance lives at once in both space and time.  In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one.  Each participates completely in the other.  There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the mechanics of the cosmos.  Lyall Watson

Dancing is the art of getting your feet out of the way faster than your partner can step on them.  Source Unknown

Dancing is the hidden language of the soul.  Martha Graham

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is not translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself. H Ellis

Dancing is the poetry of the foot.  John Dryden

Dancing is the world’s favorite metaphor.  Kristy Nilsson

Dancing is wonderful training for girls. It’s the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.  Christopher Morley

Dancing should look easy; like an optical illusion.  It should seem effortless.  When you do a difficult variation, the audience is aware that it is demanding and that you have the power and strength to do it.  But in the end, when you take your bow, you should look as if you were saying, ‘Oh, it was nothing.  I could do it again’.  Bruce Marks

Dancing with the feet is one thing, but dancing with the heart is another.  Source Unknown

Dancing: The highest intelligence in the freest body.  Isadora Duncan

Dancing’s just a conversation between two people.  Talk to me.  Steven Rogers

Dancing’s not work. You can’t call it work.  A day I don’t dance is a day I don’t live. from ‘Serpent of the Nile’

Do it big, do it right, and do it with style.  Fred Astaire

Do not brood. It makes the moment you are living in unavailable for learning and life.  Suzanne Farrell

Don’t dance for the audience; dance for yourself.  Bob Fosse

Don’t judge me until you’ve taken a walk in my pointe shoes.  Source Unknown

Don’t think you are going to go on forever because you are not and begin to plan something that will compensate as you reduce your capacities to leap or turn on this or that or the other, begin thinking of something else.  Katherine Dunham

Don’t you agree?  Swordplay is a dance of sorts, an understanding of the logical, most sophisticated next step.  Except that in a fight, one must take the unexpected step.  In dance it is all about taking the right, expected step.  Lisa Tawn Bergren

Each day before the end of eve she sought her lover, nor would him leave, until the stars were dimmed, and day came glimmering eastward silver-grey.  Then trembling-veiled she would appear, and dance before him, half in fear; there flitting just before his feet, she gently chid with laughter sweet: ‘Come! dance now, Beren, dance with me!  For fain thy dancing I would see!  J.R.R. Tolkien

Eat, sleep, breathe…dance!  Source Unknown

Enjoy the process of learning to dance.  The process of our profession, and not its final achievement, is the heart and soul of dance.  Jacques d’Amboise

Even if you weren’t born with a genetically perfect body, you can take something like a hand, where everyone has the same capabilities, and you can make it speak. You can make it speak in many different ways.  Sarah Lamb

Even the ears must dance.  Natalie Makarova

Even though I am a professional, and I know what the steps are, I don’t quite know how I’m going to do them, because I haven’t lived that moment yet.  I always feel very insecure and I get very excited.  Suzanne Farrell

Even today when I rehearse, I give it everything that I’ve got.  If I’m in a performance and the lights go out, I glow in the dark.  When you’re working before an audience, you have to make them feel like they can touch you.  That’s the dancer within, reaching out.  Mitzi Gaynor

Even when she walks one would believe that she dances.  Charles Baudelaire

Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath kick off your shoes, and dance.  Oprah Winfrey

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!  Jií Kylián

Everyday has a surprise – wonder what today’s will be? I am ready to unwrap it!  Source Unknown

Everyday there must be something I can’t do, otherwise it’s boring.  Maret Robier

Everything is beautiful at the ballet.  A Chorus Line

Fantasy is a reality you can dance to.  Richard Cohen

Ferocity doesn’t care what it looks like.  Maurya Kerr

Fifth positions, heads, musicality, energy.  Not technical things so much-getting your leg higher or doing more turns but things that would set you apart from other dancers.  The only way you can be different is to be yourself.  If you don’t find your spirit and reveal it, you just look like every other dancer.  Suzanne Farrell

Fine dancing, I believe like virtue, must be its own reward.  Those who are standing by are usually thinking of something very different.  Jane Austen

Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.”Martha Graham
“First comes the sweat.  Then comes the beauty if you’re very lucky and have said your prayers.  George Balanchine

Follow your passion.  Find that something that makes you want to work at it.  Work hard.  Nothing comes without hard work.  Tomas Schramek

Football isn’t a contact sport; it’s a collision sport.  Dancing is a contact sport.  Vince Lombardi

Football players call it training; Dancers call it routine!  Source Unknown

Football players practice, dancers work!  Source Unknown

For I have trained myself and am training myself always to be able to dance lightly in the service of thought.  Johannes Climacus

God creates, I do not create.  I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it, from what I see, from what the dancers do, from what others do…. George Balanchine

God match me with a good dancer.  Shakespeare

God respects us when we work, but he loves us when we dance.  Les Blanc

Grace is to the body as judgement is to the mind.  Source Unknown

Great art is never perfect; perfect art is never great.  Edward Abbey

Great artists are people who find ways to be themselves in their art.  Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.  Margot Fonteyn

Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.  Martha Graham

He [Gene Kelly] once told me dancing was a man’s game, as much of a sport as baseball itself.  And he made us believe that.  He changed our minds and suddenly, all of America wanted to dance just like Gene Kelly.  Liza Minnelli

He can hum the music in his old man’s quivering voice, but he prefers it in his head, where it lives on in violins and reedy winds.  If he imagines it in rehearsal he can remember every step of his three-minute solo as if he had danced it only yesterday, but he knows, too, that one time, onstage in Berlin, he had not danced it as he had learned it; this much he knows but cannot recreate, could no recreate it even a moment after he had finished dancing it.  While dancing he had felt blind to the stage and audience, deaf to the music.  He had let his body do what it needed to do, free to expand and contract in space, to soar and spin. So, accordingly, when he tries to remember the way he danced it on stage, he cannot hear the music or feel his feet or get a sense of the audience.  He is embryonic, momentarily cut off from the world around him.  The three most important minutes of his life, the ones that determined his fate and future, are the three to which he cannot gain access, ever.  Evan Fallenberg

He was shockingly easy to follow.  The pressure of his hand, the step of his foot, the angle of his frame… it was like reading his mind.  When he leaned right, they turned in perfect unison.  He swept her across the gallery in a quick three, a dizzying pace.  Gilded frames and glass cases and the window blurred in her vision, and Azalea spun out, her skirts pulling and poofing around her, before he caught her and brought her back into dance position. She could almost hear music playing, swelling inside of her.  Mother had once told her about this perfect twining into one. She called it interweave, and said it was hard to do, for it took the perfect matching of the partners’ strengths to overshadow each other’s weaknesses, meshing into one glorious dance.  Azalea felt the giddiness of being locked in not a pairing, but a dance.  So starkly different than dancing with Keeper.  Never that horrid feeling that she owed him something; no holding her breath, wishing for the dance to end.  Now, spinning from Mr. Bradford’s hand, her eyes closed, spinning back and feeling him catch her, she felt the thrill of the dance, of being matched, flow through her.  ”Heavens, you’re good!” said Azalea, breathless.  “You’re stupendous,” said Mr. Bradford, just as breathless.  “It’s like dancing with a top!  Heather Dixon

He who cannot dance puts the blame on the floor.  Hindu proverb

He who dances without leading is merely making the girl mad.  Author Unknown

He’s at ease, his body sculpted to the music, his shoulder searching the other shoulder, his right toe knowing the left knee, the height, the depth, the form, the control, the twist of his wrist, the bend of his elbow, the tilt of his neck, notes digging into arteries, and he is in the air now, forcing the legs up beyond muscular memory, one last press of the thighs, an elongation of form, a loosening of human contour, he goes higher and is skyheld.  Colum McCann

Hold your hands out gently.  Ask others to do the same.  See how different each person looks.  Each person has their own unique and natural beauty.  Use this natural beauty when you dance.  Respect your individuality.  Artemis Mourat

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anyone else expects of you.  Source Unknown

How can we know the dancer from the dance?  William Butler Yeats

How did she do it, I’d always wondered.  Dancing with Q., I understood.  Once in a while the pain falls asleep on the job, and the experienced sufferer knows enough to seize such moments swiftly and without thought – for when we realize we’re actually dancing, the jolt of joy wakens the pain.  Lynn Sharon Schwartz

I am a cloud – in trousers.  George Balanchine

I am a dancer.  I believe that we learn by practice.  Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living…. In each it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit.  One becomes in some area an athlete of God.  Martha Graham

I believe that my whole creative life stemmed from this magic hour under the stars on that hilltop.  Ruth St. Denis

I came to see that movement is one of the great laws of life.  It is the primary medium of our aliveness, the flow of energy going on in us like a river all the time, awake or asleep, twenty-four hours a day.  Our movement is our behavior; there is a direct connection between what we are like and how we move…As people begin to move in their own way, they are faced with feelings of surprise and delight and often of anxiety and embarrassment.  Judgments, corrections and explanations are of no use.  It is their movement, and it happened just that way.  Mary Whitehouse

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.  J.G. Noverre

I consider myself an actress first, a dancer second, and a singer third.  Why?  Because the dancer needs a reason to move—that’s the actor informing the dancer.  So I worked on my acting and gradually developed a singing voice.  Liza Minnelli

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

I dance, therefore I am.  Source Unknown

I do everything I know how in a dance.  Twyla Tharp

I do everything the man does, only backwards and in high heels!  Ginger Rogers

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer.  For the dance is his ideal.  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

I do not try to dance better than anyone else.  I only try to dance better than myself.  Mikhail Baryshnikov

I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.  Carrie Fisher

I don’t want people who want to dance, I want people who have to dance.  George Balanchine

I don’t want to hide.  I want to slow dance with you again.  I want to dance with you forever.  Sarah Black

I feel that the essence of dance is the expression of man, the landscape of his soul.  I hope that every dance I do reveals something of myself or some wonderful thing a human can be.  Martha Graham

I found that dance was key to keeping depression out of my life. When you dance, things just go away, things don’t seem so bad.  There’s no better way to take care of health than through something as joyous and beautiful as dance.  Patrick Swayze

I get into the studio and I try to make visible what’s in the choreographer’s mind.  Sometimes a choreographer wants you to have an idea, and sometimes you are the idea.  Angel Corella

I had to learn that slower is faster.  If you practice every day with patience and correctness, you will get there.  It’s like preparing for a jump.  You can’t rush.  You must summon the appropriate energy with split-second timing and have an understanding of purpose to get up in the air.  It requires training, confidence and mental effort.  You can’t have a vocabulary without the alphabet.  Balanchine used to say, “Do you want to be a poet of gesture or do you want to be a physical entity?  Edward Villella

I have a fabulous life.  It is interesting and rigorous.  I work hard.  So leave me alone.  Watch my dust.  Shut up.  Mark Morris

I have performed for thousands when they found me exotic, the vogue, daring, but I have danced, at any given time, for about ten people…. They were the ones that left the theater forever different from the way they were when they came in.  All of my long, long life, I have danced for those ten.  Ruth St. Denis

I just know that when I go on stage, I give everything I have, not only my legs, not only my feet, not only my body.  I try to tell a story.  Sometimes I’m able to cry because I feel like it.  Sometimes I’m able to love because I feel like it.  Sylvie Gulliem

I knew my way around a stage and was strong, so I could lift my partners up and put them down softly.  And the other thing that I understood was the importance of eye contact.  It’s essential when you’re performing to remain connected with the person you’re dancing with.  I see it on the stage all the time when the dancers drop out of character and for the “look at me thing”  They break that famous fourth wall and let the audience in on the dancer’s private thinking, not the character’s thinking.  That will destroy a performance.  James Mitchell

I know that applause is food for the arts, but it ceases to be wholesome if administered indiscriminately; and the nutrition is so rich that, far from strengthening the constitution, it disturbs and enfeebles it.  Stage beginners are similar to those children totally spoiled by the blind affection of their parents.  J.G. Noverre

I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.  Louise Brooks

I like dancing of Indian girls more than my parents’ prayers, because they dance with love and passion.  But my parents just say their prayers because they got used to it.  Ali Shariati

I praise the dance, for it frees people from the heaviness of matter and binds the isolated to community.  I praise the dance, which demands everything: health and a clear spirit and a buoyant soul.  Dance is a transformation of space, of time, of people, who are in constant danger of becoming all brain, will, or feeling.  Dancing demands a whole person, one who is firmly anchored in the center of his life, who is not obsessed by lust for people and things and the demon of isolation in his own ego.  Dancing demands a freed person, one who vibrates with the equipoise of all his powers.  I praise the dance.  O man, learn to dance, or else the angels in heaven will not know what to do with you.  Saint Augustine

I see dance being used as communication between body and soul, to express what it too deep to find for words.  Ruth St. Denis

I set as my goal to be the best dancer I could be.  Not the most famous, or the highest paid dancer, just the best I could be.  Out of this discipline came great freedom and calm.  Suzanne Farrell

I should never conclude were I to speak to you of all the misfortunes which have their origin in the faulty carriage of the body.  All these defects, mortifying for those who have contracted them, cannot be remedied except in their early stages.  A habit born in childhood is strengthened in youth, becomes deeply rooted in adulthood and is incurable in old age.  Jean Georges Noverre

I think it was important that I learned to love to dance eventually for its own sake, as opposed to wanting to be a ballerina.  Suzanne Farrell

I think most dancers would agree that the art of ballet chooses the dancer, not the other way around.  Kevin McKenzie

I think that probably the moments of discovery do come from a place that is not totally organized.  Order is something that we already know about.  Discoveries are in a place we don’t already know about.  Twyla Tharp

I use dancing to embellish, extend or enlarge upon an existing emotion.  Gower Champion

was always hanging around, trying to imitate the dancers.  One day I was in the rehearsal room with Cyd Charisse when she stopped cold and yelled, “She has to sit down. She’s driving me crazy.” “I’m sorry Cyd,” I said, and sat down quietly.  But then I thought to myself, how am I going to learn this?  I watched her and counted.  At the break I’d run into another room and practice.  Then I’d run back and learn the rest of it.  So I learned at a very young age how to pick up steps.  This gave me a great advantage later on.  I could learn choreography very quickly.  And I did something else.  I’d watch the choreographer’s face.  I realized that if you watched his face, you got the reason, the intention, the answer to why he was doing the steps.  Liza Minnelli

I was born from a boombox.  My heart is a dancer.  Source Unknown

I was very happy that I was as normal as possible before I went into serious dance.  Suzanne Farrell

I will make an average man into an average dancer, provided he be passably well made.  I will teach him how to move his arms and legs, to turn his head.  I will give him steadiness, brilliancy and speed; but I cannot endow him with that fire and intelligence, those graces and that expression of feeling which is the soul of true pantomime.  Jean Georges Noverre

I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.  Friedrich Nietzsche

I would have to challenge the term, modern dance.  I don’t really use that term in relation to my work.  I simply think of it as dancing.  I think of it as moving.  Twyla Tharp

I would like to make it clear from the start that these dances are primarily meant to be a kind of food for the eye.  If they evoke dramatic images and riddles, the key to their solution lies not so much in the brain, but in the senses and the eye of the spectator.  Paul Taylor

I would like to tell all dancers to forget themselves and the desire for self-display.  They must become completely absorbed in the dance.  Even in a classical variation there should never be any thought of a dancer doing a variation – he should become identified with it.  Anthony Tudor

I’m very excited about dance and love it with a deep passion.  I also struggle, tire and become discouraged.  But what has always revived me…has been the rebirth of energy each time the creative process is awakened and artistic activity begins to unfold even in some infinitesimal measure.  Ann Halprin

If anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away.  Maria Tallchief

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.  John F. Kennedy

If I can not dance, I shall die!  Anna Pavlova

If I can’t dance in heaven, let me live here forever.  Source Unknown

If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point dancing it.  Isadora Duncan

If I had listened to the critics I’d have died drunk in the gutter.  Chekov

If I have to explain dancing to you, you won’t get it.  Source Unknown

If I see a human body on the stage, I don’t see it as an abstraction.  I see it as a body.  Anthony Tudor

If it were not for dreams there would not be such a thing as ballet, the cruelest of the performing arts.  Source Unknown

If one had to define one essential gift with which a dancer needs to be endowed, there might be a rush of answers.  A beautiful body, grace of line, graciousness of spirit, joy in the work, ability to please, unswerving integrity, relentless ambition towards some abstract perfection.  Certainly all these factors determine a dancer’s character, and every element exists in some combination within the performing artist’s presence.  Lincoln Kirstein

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 George Noverre

If the dance is right, there shouldn’t be a single superfluous movement.  Fred Astaire

If theater is ritual, then dance is too… It’s as if the threads connecting us to the rest of the world were washed clean of preconceptions and fears.  When you dance, you can enjoy the luxury of being you.  Paulo Coelho

If their feet aren’t in the right place, at least their hearts are.  Christian M. Chensvold

If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.  George Bernard Shaw

If you dance with your heart your body will follow.  Mia Michaels

If you look at a dancer in silence, his or her body will be the music.  If you turn the music on, that body will become an extension of what you’re hearing.  Judith Jamison

If you want to dance seriously, do.  You must think about it day and night, dream about it, desire it.  Christa Justus

If you’ve got nothing to dance about, find a reason to sing.  Melody Carstairs

I’m dancing to the music of the madness inside me.  George C. Wolfe

I’m not ashamed of heroic ambitions.  If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun… let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus… Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one.  Roman Payne

I’m not one who divides music, dance or art into various categories.  Either something works, or it doesn’t.  Twyla Tharp

In a dancer, there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength.  Martha Graham

In a society that worships love, freedom and beauty, dance is sacred, it is a prayer for the future, a remembrance of the past and a joyful exclamation of thanks for the present.  Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

In couple dances, gentlemen, hold onto her like you like her.  Richard Duree

In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.  Edward Bulwer-Lytton

In life, as in dance, grace glides on blistered feet.  Alice Abrams

In order that our art may arrive at the degree of the sublime which I demand and hope for, it is imperative for dancers to divide their time and studies between the mind and the body, and that both become the object of their application; but, unfortunately, all is given to the latter and nothing to the former.  The legs are rarely guided by the brain, and, since intelligence and taste do not reside in the feet, one often goes astray.  Jean George Noverre

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 George Noverre

In swing, whatever works is right.  Source Unknown

In the pivotal moves of the dance, those in which the dance partners exchange leadership, the power of the dance can be seen to alternate as quickly as that of sweat-slick wrestlers or fate-heavy duelists.  Dominance is always fragile and unsure; subjugation is merely quiescence in which to plot the regaining of the upper hand.  Thus, energies of ego and control struggle in a psychomania in three dimensions on the dance floor.  Richard Martin

It always takes two.  There’s the speaker and the listener, you and the audience.  You’ve worked long hours and it comes down to that moment, that performance. The goal isn’t just to improve yourself, but to transport people.  Gillian Murphy

It is more important who they are as people and only then is it important who they are as dancers.  Marcia Haydee

It is not a question of who dances but of who or what does not dance.  Ruth St. Denis

It is not so much upon the number of exercises, as the care with which they are done, that progress and skill depend.  August Bournonville

It is not the movements that make a dance beautiful, it is the emotions that inspired the movement that make it beautiful.  Kristy Nilsson

It is shameful that dancing should renounce the empire it might assert over the mind and only endeavor to please the sight.  Jean Geroge Noverre

It is through strength of technique that the body stays in possession of music.  Arlene Croce

It takes an athlete to dance, but an artist to be a dancer.  Shanna LaFleur

It takes ten years, usually, to make a dancer.  It takes ten years of handling the instrument, handling the material with which you are dealing, for you to know it completely.  Martha Graham

It was Anna Pavlova, and no one else, who opened the world to ballet.  t was she who did the back-breaking work of pioneering.  It was Pavlova who found and cultivated audiences for contemporary ballet companies.  Her service to ballet is priceless.  No other single human being did more for ballet than she.  To all the millions of people for whom she danced she brought little of herself…what remains of Pavlova today is not a movement in the art, not a tendency, not even a series of dances.  It is something far less concrete, but possibly more valuable: inspiration.  Hilda Dutsova

It’s the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.  It is the dream afraid of waking that never takes the chance.  It is the one who won’t be taken who cannot seem to give.  And the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live.  Bette Midler

It’s true of all great artists that the more you see, the more you want to see.  Peter Anastos

It’s a wonderful thing to be able to dance, tell your body what you want it to do.  Suzanne Farrell

It’s extremely arrogant and foolish to think you can ever outwit your audience.  Twyla Tharp

It’s like an emotional dance party:  Some dances will be your favorites, others more awkward or difficult to learn.  Some will be boring or make you mad.  Some you will wish you never needed to do again.  But AHA! You think.  I will dance all the dances I can.  SARK

It’s like the time capsule with everything in it.  Or like the seed that when you plant it, becomes the enormous tree with leaves and fruit.  Everybody was in that little seed, and so everything can open.  The tree of dance is like that.  It just takes a long, long time to blossom.  George Balanchine

It’s not magic! It’s physics.  The speed of the turn is what keeps you upright.  Deborah Bull

It’s not the turning that’s hard in pirouettes.  It’s that you’ve got to keep on doing it.  Source Unknown

It’s what I always wanted to do, to show the laughter, the fun the joy of dance.  Martha Graham

Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can’t fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.  Jack Kerouac

Just remember when you’re not practicing that someone somewhere is and when you meet them, they will win.  Jaques d’Amboise

Kids:  they dance before they learn there is anything that isn’t music.  William Edgar Stafford

Lady Dance’s music wasn’t a magic charm. I’d misunderstood.  We had all failed to understand.  The song and dance didn’t stop us dying.  It just stopped the fear of death swallowing us up while we were still alive.  ‘Rejoice,’ came the soft voice of Lady Dance in my mind.  ‘Watch the moon and stars…’ Death had ruled my life till I met Lady Dance.  Her dance had set me free.  Jackie French

Learning to walk sets you free.  Learning to dance gives you the greatest freedom of all: to express your whole self, the person you are.  Melissa Hayden

Lermontov:  Why do you want to dance?  Vicky:  Why do you want to live?  Lermontov:  Well, I don’t know exactly why, but… I must.  Vicky: That’s my answer too.  ‘The Red Shoes’

Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair…  Susan Polis Shutz

Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.  Voltaire

Letting go of perfectionism, so ingrained in the nature of a ballet dancer, can be the most difficult thing.  Source Unknown

Life is a dance, from one stage to the next.  Source Unknown

Life is short and there will always be dirty dishes, so let’s dance.  James Howe

Life is sweet when you pay attention.  When it doesn’t seem sweet, put a sticker on your nose and do a funky dance.  Whitney Scott

Life is the dancer and you are the dance.  Eckhart Tolle

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to be over, it’s about learning how to dance in the rain.  Source Unknown

Life may not be the party that we hoped for…But while we’re here, we should dance.  Source Unknown

Light quirks of music, broken and uneven, make the soul dance upon a jig to Heav’n.  Alexander Pope

Live your truth.  Express your love.  Share your enthusiasm.  Take action towards your dreams.  Walk your talk.  Dance and sing to your music.  Embrace your blessings.  Make today worth remembering.  Steve Maraboli

Long experience has taught me that the crux of my fortunes is whether I can radiate good will toward my audience.  There is only one way to do it and that is to feel it. You can fool the eyes and minds of the audience, but you cannot fool their hearts.  Howard Thurston

Love is a lot like dancing; you just surrender to the music.  Pierce Brosnan

Love is the key to success.  You can call it different things, and get technical about it, but that’s what it comes down to.  Love is the most powerful source from which all creativity grows.  People often believe that it’s angst or torment that inspires creative work, but for me it’s love.  I try to infuse my work with this magical ingredient, and when I do, everything is taken care of.  Success comes when the intention to serve what you love and feel passionate about is realized.  You may not become financially successful or publicly celebrated, but that is not always the true measure of success.  For example, the short-order cook who makes a perfect scrambled egg because of the care he’s invested is a success.  I feel like I’m doing what I was put here to do.  When you find something that you love to do and people love to see you do it, that’s the happiest that a man can be.  What makes me feel successful is using the gifts that have been bestowed upon me and giving them back In the form of entertainment.  Tommy Tune

Man must speak, then sing, then dance.  The speaking is the brain, the thinking man.  The singing is the emotion.  The dancing is the Dionysian ecstasy which carries away all.  Isadora Duncan

Many of the simplest exercises become harder in the center.  Camilla Jessel

Many other women kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster.  These are poor substitutes for passion.  Agnes de Mille

Master technique and then forget about it and be natural.  Anna Pavlova

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

Most dancers I know, especially the talented and successful ones, seem to possess [my dog’s] knack for living moment to moment. You see, their idea of time is related to those infinitely short moments when they are onstage being their superselves.  Paul Taylor

Most people think of ballet as children in little tutus. They don’t know it is sweat, blood and tears as well!  Nan Keating

Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather to all who can read it.  Martha Graham

Movement without meaning is just exercise.  Marie Brooks

Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul.  Plato

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance.  Ezra Pound

Musicality is when the dancers’ movements appear to create the music – and not the other way around.  Kristy Nilsson

My boyfriend said, “Me or Dance.” Gosh I miss him…  Source Unknown

My muse must come to me on union time.  George Balanchine

Never dance in a puddle when there’s a hole in your shoe (it’s always best to take your shoes off first).  John D. Rhodes

Never trust spiritual leader who cannot dance.  Mr. Miyagi, The Next Karate Kid

Nice men marry dancers.  Real men become Dancers!  Source Unknown

No artist is ahead of his time.  He is time; the others are just behind the times.  Martha Graham

No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.  Mikhail Baryshnikov

No matter the style, the farther one goes the more obstacles increase, and the more distant appears the object it is desired to attain.  Again, the most strenuous labor affords the greatest artists but a disquieting gleam which only reveals their inadequacy, while the self-satisfied ignoramus surrounded by the deepest gloom flatters himself that he has nothing more to learn.  Jean George Noverre

No one can arrive from being talented alone. God gives talent; work transforms talent into genius.  Anna Pavlova

Nobody cares if you can’t dance well.  Just get up and dance. Dave Barry

Nothing so clearly and inevitably reveals the inner man than movement and gesture.  It is quite possible, if one chooses, to conceal and dissimulate behind words or paintings or statues or other forms of human expression, but the moment you move you stand revealed, for good or ill, for what you are. Doris Humphrey

Now I am going to reveal to you something which is very pure, a totally white thought.  It is always in my heart; it blooms at each of my steps… The Dance is love, it is only love, it alone, and that is enough… I, then, it is amorously that I dance:  to poems, to music but now I would like to no longer dance to anything but the rhythm of my soul.  Isadora Duncan

O body swayed to music; O brightening glance; How can we know the dancer from the dance?  William Butler Yeats

Of course I have an ATTITUDE, I’m a dancer!  Source Unknown

On dancing on pointe:  Why don’t they just get taller girls?  Henny Youngman

On the plié and rélevé is based the whole structure of the classical ballet.  Christian Johansson

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet.  To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.  George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

One can be a great artist without being a great technician.  There have been many famous ballet stars who did not have the ideal body or total mastery of all aspects of the art form, but on the stage they possessed magnetism—true artistry, by which I mean a charismatic quality.  You can work with a coach to try and develop it, but a true artist has the ability to express his inner feelings naturally.  Fernando Bujones

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.  Helen Keller

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.  One may be able to acquire a certain technical facility, but no one can ever ‘acquire an exceptional talent.  George Balanchine

Only angels and ballerinas dance on their toes.  David Ira Rottenberg

Opportunity dances with those already on the dance floor.  H. Jackson Brown Jr.

Our biological rhythms are the symphony of the cosmos, music embedded deep within us to which we dance, even when we can’t name the tune.  Deepak Chopra

Our bodies are at once the receiving and transmitting stations for life itself.  It is the highest wisdom to recognize this fact and train our bodies to render them sensitive and responsive to nature, art and religion.  Ruth St. Denis

Our classes are our practices.  Our dance sneakers are our equipment.  Our teacher is our coach.  Our dance clothes are our jerseys.  Our performances are our matches.  Our audiences are our fans.  Our concert is our tournament.  The rhythm is our rule.  Failure is our opponent; we will not lose.  This is our game.  This is our sport.  Vala Yankovski

Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall.  Confucius

Our pointe shoes are our instruments.  If something’s wrong with my feet, all my mind goes there.  I usually have six pairs ready.  Soft shoes for one act, stiffer shoes for another, stronger shoes for a variation with a lot of turns.  Nina Ananiashvili

Our profession creates illusions.  It is not a matter of having a perfect body, but of dancing in such a way as to look perfect.  Wilheim Burmann

People come to see beauty, and I dance to give it to them.  Judith Jamison

People tend to look at dancers like we are these little jewels, little cardboard cut-outs, and yet we have blood and guts and go through Hell.  Susan Jaffe

Persevere, don’t let someone tell you’re not good. This business is very subjective. Tomas Schramek

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

Plie is the first thing you learn and the last thing you master.  Suzanne Farrell

Poetry is like dancing. Not all of us can be ballet dancers, but all of us dance.  Everyone has a poet inside of him struggling to get out.  Marks and Spencer

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.  John Wain

Poise is the finest point of balance it is possible to attain, both mentally and physically.  The various parts of the physique having been adjusted truly to the centre of gravity, poise lifts the whole being to a point so delicate that it almost defies definition… Poise, the great law of equilibrium, is that second in infinity when action ceases and there is rest.  Ruby Ginner

Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.  Martha Graham

Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there’s already a plot.  George Balanchine

Real men don’t lift weights, they lift women.  Source Unknown

Righteous, I like that.  Kinda fitting when you think about it.  If we danced and shared music, we’d be too busy en-joy-in’ life to start a war.  E.A. Bucchianeri

Seen from the wings, a ballerina’s life is made-up of sheer physical misery relieved only by the euphoria of performance.  Physical agony is a normal thing backstage and arouses the awe and pity only of outsiders unused to its sight.  Source Unknown

She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.  Jane Fitch

So if the dance is five minutes long, make yourself run for perhaps eight minutes.  That way, you over-train and the dance will seem easier…Deborah Bull

So many dancers feel that what they look like is more important than who they are.  This is a real danger for dancers who focus for years on appearances and think of themselves as merely a body.  The choreographer can’t work with them in the realm of ideas.  It’s a huge problem if they haven’t been connecting internally.  If they’ve decided that what’s inside is of little value, they can only try to approximate some kind of look.  Alonzo King

So many dancers leave me untouched, unmoved.  A dancer should be able to raise an arm and make someone cry, in the way Isadora Duncan did.  It is a necessity for any art to move you.  Pauline Koner

So many dancers rely on some sort of magic happening on the stage.  They never, for various reasons, work full out in rehearsal.  That’s very uncreative.  They don’t discover the kinds of things that add up to a remarkable performance.  Benjamin Harkarvy

So, I think I would say, enjoy the process of learning to dance.  The process of our profession, and not its final achievement, is the heart and soul of dance.  Jacques d’Amboise

Socrates learned to dance when he was seventy because he felt that an essential part of himself had been neglected.  Source Unknown

Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can.  Martha Graham

Some people seem to think that good dancers are born, but all the good dancers I have known are taught or trained.  Fred Astaire

Someone need not be perfect to be a great dancer – feeling a soul is more important than what the body can do.  Marcia Haydée

Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policemen, always alert, always tense.  But see, policemen don’t have to be beautiful at the same time.  George Balanchine

Sometimes I have conflicting emotions because it’s been going on for so long now, but then I see somebody dancing real well and it just comes back like an old love.  The flame ignites again.  Ann Reinking

Stifling an urge to dance is bad for your health – it rusts your spirit and your hips.  Adabella Radici

Style is an afterthought, not something that is preconceived.  If I’m digging for diamonds in a mine, the maze that I’ve dug, which might look interesting, is just an aftereffect of all the digging, nothing more.  The Buddhists say, “Look.”  But we get hung up staring at the finger instead of where it’s pointing.  Alonzo King

Success comes from having a fulfilling experience and being inside the moment of that experience.  Success does not come in retrospect or as a recollection or even as an evaluation from others.  lt’s not something that you can physically hold onto or repeat at will.  Only when you acknowledge the special moments can you truly feel the effects of your most wonderful achievements.  Tommy Tune

Talk about dance?  Dance is not something to talk about.  Dance is to dance. Peter Saint James

Technical perfection is insufficient. It is an orphan without the true soul of the dancer.  Sylvie Guillem

Technique – bodily control – must be mastered only because the body must not stand in the way of the soul’s expression.  La Meri

Technique is what you fall back on when you run out of inspiration.  Rudolf Nureyev

Technique is what you need to do to dance well, principally to make it feel good to your partner.  Style is everything else you do when you dance, hopefully to make it look good to your partner, and your audience.  David Barker

That which cannot be spoken can be sung; that which cannot be sung can be danced.  French proverb

The abuse of the best things is always detrimental.  Jean Georege Noverre

The actor should know how to use his body, and have every part of it completely under his command, that he may use the whole of himself to interpret any character in its own rhythm.  Conversely the dancer should study emotion and character in order that his every movement may have meaning.  Ruby Ginner

The artistic path is a fearless occupation.  Alonzo King

The audiences’ ears hear the music and their eyes see you being that music.  Dance is the music made visible.  You are the music!  Source Unknown

The ballet is a purely female thing.  It is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.  George Balanchine

The Ballet toe shoe is one of the few instruments of torture to survive intact into our time.  Source Unknown

The better dancers get, the crazier they are.  Or free, if you don’t like crazy.  James Waring

The body is the source of amazing energy.  This thing wants to live.  It is a powerful engine.  The brain (is) a reservoir of images, dreams, fears, associations, language.  And its potential we can’t even begin to understand.  Movement begins to negotiate the distance between the brain and the body and it can be surprising what we learn about each other.  Bill T. Jones

The body says what words cannot.  Martha Graham

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 the work of a magician.  George Balanchine

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

The choreographic process is exhausting.  It happens on one’s feet after hours of work, and the energy required is roughly the equivalent of writing a novel and winning a tennis match simultaneously.  Agnes de Mille

The dance exists exclusively in terms of the movement of the body, not only in the obvious sense that the dancer moves, but also in the less apparent sense that its response in the spectator is likewise a matter of body movement.  John Martin

The Dance instills in you something that sets you apart.  Something heroic and remote.  Edgar Degas

The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.  Mata Hari

The dance is the mother of the arts.  Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space.  But the dance lives at once in time and space.  Curt Sachs

The dance world is too small in lots of ways – it’s too intense, it rattles around itself, and it needs exposing to other ideas.  Siobhan Davies

The dance, just as the performance of the actor, is kinesthetic art, art of the muscle sense.  The awareness of tension and relaxation within his own body, the sense of balance that distinguishes the proud stability of the vertical from the risky adventures of thrusting and falling – these are the tools of the dancer.  Rudolf Arnheim

The dance, more than any other art, lives through the genius of its interpreters.  Lillian Moore

The dancer, or dancers, must transform the stage for the audience as well as for themselves into an autonomous, complete, virtual realm, and all motions into a play of visible forces in unbroken, virtual time… Both space and time, as perceptible factors, disappear almost entirely in the dance illusion.  Susanne K. Langer

The dancer’s body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul.  The true dance is an expression of serenity; it is controlled by the profound rhythm of inner emotion.  Emotion does not reach the moment of frenzy out of a spurt of action; it broods first, it sleeps like the life in the seed, and it unfolds with a gentle slowness.  The Greeks understood the continuing beauty of a movement that mounted, that spread, that ended with a promise of rebirth.  Isadora Duncan

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

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 George 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 George Noverre

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.  Mikhail Baryshnikov

The expression should come from within oneself, conveying the spiritual –something between earth and heaven.  And if one runs, one should not seem to touch the ground.  Natalya Makarova

The first time I started choreographing was in the dark, in my living room, with the lights completely out, to some popular music on the radio. I put the radio on full blast and I started moving.  I didn’t know what it looked like.  I didn’t want to see it… I had to start in the dark.  Judith Jamison

The heart of the dance is the heart of the dancer.  Ghazallah al-Badriyyah

The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed.  Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it’s considered to be your style.  Fred Astaire

The journey between who you once were, and who you are now becoming, is where the dance of life really takes place.  Barbara De Angelis

The main thing is dancing, and before it withers away from my body, I will keep dancing till the last moment, the last drop.  Rudolph Nureyev

The Marquesan girls dance all over; not only do their feet dance, but their arms, hands, fingers, ay, their very eyes seem to dance in their heads.  Herman Melville

The mechanics of épaulement are what gives ballet its inner transitions.  William Forsythe

The mirror is not you.  The mirror is you looking at yourself.  George Balanchine

The more you understand the music, the easier you can dance.  Orlando Gutinez

The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the class work not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to become moments of dancing too.  Merce Cunningham

The mother of the dance is the melody because she gives you everything, tells you everything you need to know, like a mother.  The father of the dance is the rhythm and he is the strong one, the leader, the authority, as a father should be!  Tayyar Akdeniz

The noble entitlement bespeaks an élan, a certain type of relationship with your partner.  It means formidable technique not displayed lightly.  The excitement comes from elegance.  Kevin McKenzie

The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one’s work seriously and taking oneself seriously.  The first is imperative and the second disastrous.  Dame Margot Fonteyn

The only thing I fear more than change is no change.  Twyla Tharp

The only way to do it is to do it.  Merce Cunningham

The physical language of the body is so much more powerful than words.  Bill Irwin

The problem is not making up the steps but deciding which ones to keep.  Mikhail Baryshnikov

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

The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.  Colum McCann

The really great dancer is perhaps a rarer phenomenon than great musicians, painters or sculptors.  This is because dance is a consummation of all these arts.  The dancer, in addition to the qualities that pure dance demands, must be sensitive to and have an uncanny ear for music, must have a painter’s sensibility to the significant line, a sculptor’s approach to form, an architect’s vision of spaceand a trained actor’s responses to dramatic situations.  K. Subhas Chandran

The teacher doesn’t teach, not really.  The teacher offers stimulation and ways in which the person can educate himself or herself.  At best the teacher wakes up that person and makes a person hungry.  Murray Louis

The trained dancer must not only have grace and elegance, but also the leap of an Olympic hurdler, the balance of a tight-rope walker and panther-like strength and agility.  Camilla Jessel

The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music.  Bodies never lie.  Agnes de Mille

The ultimate aim of all dance must be to move the whole being together in harmony.  Therefore, having made the body sensitive, let it be swept by rhythm:  the rhythm of music, by moving to a good swinging simple tune; the rhythm of nature, by floating in the sea, and surrendering to the will of the waves; or by lying on the branches of a tree in the wind to feel its effortless swaying.  In this way the outer and the inner being will be harmonized.  Ruby Ginner

The word ‘figure’ from choreography . . . means something like a momentary attitude of the body or a fragment of a dance.  Sue Ellen Campbell

The world loves a clone and a good knock-off.  It cheats the artist… In the obsession for technical wizardry, people disappear; and if your voice isn’t present in a relationship, you don’t matter.  Alonzo King

Then come the lights shining on you from above.  You are a performer.  You forget all you learned, the process of technique, the fear, the pain, you even forget who you are you become one with the music, the lights, indeed one with the dance.  Shirley MacLaine

There are likewise three kinds of dancers:  first, those who consider dancing as a sort of gymnastic drill, made up of impersonal and graceful arabesques; second, those who, by concentrating their minds, lead the body into the rhythm of a desired emotion, expressing a remembered feeling or experience.  And finally, there are those who convert the body into a luminous fluidity, surrendering it to the inspiration of the soul.  Isadora Duncan

There are short-cuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.  Vicki Baum

There are those who dance to the rhythm that is played to them, those who only dance to their own rhythm, and those who don’t dance at all.  José Bergamín

There are three steps you have to complete to become a professional dancer:  learn to dance, learn to perform and learn how to cope with injuries. D. Gere

There are times when the simple dignity of movement can fulfill the function of a volume of words.  Doris Humphrey

There are two basic elements to classical ballet.  They are quality and quantity. Quantity is how much a dancer can physically do…the element that gives an artist the freedom to concentrate on quality, while quality is how he or she does it…quality of movement…the most difficult phase… requires long and arduous training.  Igor Schwezof

There comes a moment in a young artist’s life when he know she has to bring something to the stage from within himself.  He has to put in something in order to be able to take something.  Mikhail Baryshnikov

There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good.  Edwin Denby

There is a need to find and sing our own song, to stretch our limbs and shake them in a dance so wild that nothing can roost there, that stirs the yearning for solitary voyage.  Barbara Lazear Ascher

There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way. Christopher Morley

There was never a merry world since the fairies left off dancing.  John Selden

There was still no likelihood that we could make a living from dance.  We were doing it because we loved it… We realized how full we felt; we were surrounded by music and dancing and joy.  Alvin Ailey

There’s just something about dance, … It’s like a primal thing in all of us.  Patrick Swayze

There’s nothing more exciting than getting to create a vision in my head inspired by the dancers I’m working with.  Chris Scott

They dined on mince, and slices of quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon; and hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, they danced by the light of the moon.  Edward Lear

They who love dancing too much seem to have more brains in their feet than in their head.  Terence

They’re not particular about whether you’re playing a flatted fifth or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance to it.  Dizzy Gillespie

Think of the magic of the foot, comparatively small, upon which your whole weight rests.  It’s a miracle, and the dance…..is a celebration of that miracle.  Martha Graham

This art, born of genius and good taste, can become beautiful and varied to an infinite degree.  Jean George Noverre

This is not a pleasant route for many young people to consider.  You have to be either hopelessly passionate, or very stupid.  Twyla Tharp

This search for what you want is like tracking something that doesn’t want to be tracked.  It takes time to get a dance right, to create something memorable.  Fred Astaire

Those move easiest who have learned to dance.  Alexander Pope

Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.  Angela Monet

Thousands of emotions well up inside me throughout the day.  They are released when I dance.  Abraham Lincoln

To be an artist includes much; one must possess many gifts – absolute gifts – which have not been acquired by one’s own effort.  And, moreover, to succeed, the artist must possess the courageous soul… The brave soul.  The soul that dares and defies.  Kate Chopin

To be creative means to be in love with life.  You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.  Osho

To change the world, you must first change yourself. And baby, that’s hard enough.  Alonzo King

To dance is to be out of yourself, larger, more beautiful, more powerful.  This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.  Agnes De Mille

To dance is to challenge the body which is also the self. To generate an action which has a force of its own and allow the movement to penetrate the inner sensibilities, or to calculate the action and try to tune out–this is difficult, perhaps impossible.  Katherine Litz

To dance is to reach for a word that doesn’t exist, to sing the heartsong of a thousand generations, to feel the meaning of a moment in time.  Beth Jones

To dance without the help of any other art, to express, not another’s thought or rhythm, but the vision of the artist’s own spirit, that is the highest form of dance.  The most exquisite expressions are those when the spirit only makes the song, and the dancer moves in a beauty of silence akin to the silence of the stars.  Ruby Ginner

To dance, put your hand on your heart and listen to the sound of your soul.  Luigi

To learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same.  Martha Graham

To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there’s no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other.  Jack Handey

To sing well and to dance is to be well educated.  Plato

To touch, to move, to inspire.  This is the true gift of dance.  Aubrey Lynch

To watch us dance is to hear our hearts speak.  Hopi Indian Saying

Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.  Agnes de Mille

Treat each class as if it were your first.  Suzanne Farrell

True art consists in concealing art.  Jean George Noverre

Try to be fearless, because fear can inhibit you and keep you from a life.  Miranda Weese

We dancers are very lonely people.  We work together but we are very much self-made, self-centered individuals.  Source Unknown

We do not always dance because we are happy, but we dance and cannot help but become happy.  Source Unknown

We ought to dance with rapture that we might be alive… and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.  D.H. Lawrence

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

We should realize in a vivid and revolutionary sense that we are not in our bodies but our bodies are in us.  Ruth St. Denis

We think to dance, and dance in thought.  But to hibernate in the mind, is to bring upon us an apocalypse of the Soul.  Ilyas Kassam

We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.  Japanese Proverb

What is expressive in a dance is not the dancer’s opinions, psychological, political, or moral.  It isn’t even what she thinks about episodes in her private life.  What is expressive in dancing is the way she moves about the stage, the way she exhibits her body in motion.  Edwin Denby

What is modern about modern dance is its resistance to the past, its response to the present, its constant redefining if the idea of dance.  Marcia B. Siegel

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

When a small child, I thought that success spelled happiness.  I was wrong, happiness is like a butterfly which appears and delights us for one brief moment, but soon flits away.  Anna Pavlova

When asked about his philosophy of dance, Mark Morris replied:  “My philosophy of dance?  I make it up and you watch it.  End of philosophy.”
“When I dance I am really meditating rather than performing for an audience.   I am completely absorbed by the music and the steps I choose to respond to the music.  Agnes de Mille

When I miss class for one day, I know it.  When I miss class for two days, my teacher knows it.  When I miss class for three days, the audience knows it.  Rudolf Nureyev

When life gets you down, improvise as if crawling was part of the choreography.  Iveta Cherneva

When movement becomes ecstatic, then this is dance.  When the movement is so total there is no ego, then it is dance.  Osho

When one lifts a ballerina, it is not her weight but her nature that causes the problem.  Maris Liepa

When someone blunders, we say that he makes a misstep.  Is it then not clear that all the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill our history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill in dancing.  Moliere

When the music and dance create with accord…their magic captivates both the heart and the mind.  Jean Georges Noverre

When we give ourselves over completely to the spirit of the dance, it becomes a prayer.  Gabrielle Roth

When you are dancing with your partner, for that two and a half minutes, you are in love with each other.  You’re corresponding with each other by the moves that you make.  It’s a love affair, between you and your partner and the music. You feel the music, you feel your partner, she feels you and she feels the music.  So there the three of you are together.  You’ve got a triangle, you know.  Which one do you love best?  Frankie Manning

When you are on stage you don’t see faces.  The lights are in your eyes and you see just this black void out in front of you.  And yet you know there is life out there, and you have to get your message across.  Suzanne Farrell

When you are on the stage you are having an affair with three thousand people.  Gelsey Kirland

When you dance, your purpose is not to get to a certain place on the floor.  It’s to enjoy each step along the way.  Wayne Dyer

When you do dance, I wish you a wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do.  Source Unknown

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

Where ever a dancer stands is holy ground.  Martha Graham

While I dance I cannot judge, I cannot hate, I cannot separate myself from life.  I can only be joyful and whole. This is why I dance.  Hans Bos

Why walk when you can dance?  Source Unknown

Without dance I cannot feel my soul, hear my heart, or see my dreams.  Nahara

Without dance, what’s the pointe?  Source Unknown

Words his soul danced to.  David Malouf

Work like you don’t need the money.  Love like you’ve never been hurt.  Dance like nobody’s looking.  Source Unknown

You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled, then something has been lost.  Martha Graham

You can be Eastern or Burmese or what have you, but the function of the body and the awareness of the body results in dance and you become a dancer, not just a human being.  Martha Graham

You can dance anywhere, even if only in your heart.  Source Unknown

You can dance perfectly, but you will be never an artist if you dance without your soul.  Source Unknown

You can’t be pregnant in leotards, and this is the last chance for us to get our bodies into the shape of concert dancers and capture it with the magic of film.  Patrick Swayze

You can’t expect the audience to give you its attention.  You have to grab it.  Source Unknown

You can’t see a painter or a writer or a musician if you just look at them, but you can see a dancer in a child if they’ve studied ballet for a year.  The Dancer and the Dance

You dance love, and you dance joy, and you dance dreams.  And I know if I can make you smile by jumping over a couple of couches or running through a rainstorm, then I’ll be very glad to be a song and dance man.  Gene Kelly

You don’t enter a dance studio and say “I can’t do that.” If you do, then why are you in the studio in the first place?  Judith Jamison

You don’t have to know about ballet to enjoy it, all you have to do is look at it.  Edwin Denby

You don’t stop dancing from growing old.  You grow old from stopping to dance.  Source Unknown

You either do the pirouette or you shoot yourself – one way or the other something must happen!  Source Unknown

You get more negative reactions than positive reactions as you go through life, and the big lesson is nobody counts you out but yourself…I never have; I never will.  Buddy Ebsen

You get obsessed by dancing because there seems to be no choice.  Sometimes you are miserable, sometimes you are floating in elation.  But you can’t leave it alone until the passion is spun out. If you are lucky you try not to hate it when you leave.  Lisa Rinehart

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

You haven’t got anything to dance about until you’re over thirty-five anyway.  Bert Balladine

You know you’re dancing when tears of pain and happiness blend in with your sweat.  Source Unknown

You must have chaos within you to give rise to a dancing star.  Friedrich Nietzsche

You see, when weaving a blanket, an Indian woman leaves a flaw in the weaving of that blanket to let the soul out.  Martha Graham

You’re never more of an individual than when you’re a happy team player.  Suzanne Farrell

Young dancers are training at a very vulnerable time in their lives… So train the whole person, not just the dancer.  Deborah Bull

Your talent is God’s gift to you.  What you do with it is your gift back to God.  Source Unknown