Dancers are the athletes of God. -Albert Einstein
Real men marry dancers. Really good men become them.
For everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to reap; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up; a time to mourn and a time to dance; -Ecclesiastes 3:1-4
If your aim is to become a famous dancer and be a success, you're wishing for a noun and nouns never last as long as verbs. So make certain that dancing is what you love to do and try to dance as well as you can. This means not only that you study and rehearse every day, but also that you become aware of the art, the whole beautiful art, and try to become a piece of it. You become a piece of the art by making a difference in the life of anyone who sees you. -Paul Draper
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
You must be very careful in the use of a mirror. It teaches an actor to watch the outside rather than the inside of his soul, both in himself and in his part. -Constantin Stanislavski
In our culture, little boys are encouraged to be competitive and daring. Little girls learn that all little girls should be good and neat and careful...I believe almost all dancers, as they reach for a richly textured manner of dancing with depth and range, have to confront the limitations of those early traditional roles assigned to the sexes and refuse to be bound to them. -Daniel Nagrin 
I sacrificed marriage, children, and country to be a ballerina, and there was never any misunderstanding on my part. I knew the price. I put my dancing first, before my allegiances to friends and lovers, even husbands; before my home. It is possible to be a ballerina and give only fifty or seventy-five percent of yourself to your art, to conserve the rest and make of it a life for yourself, apart from the stage. But that was not for me. I gave one hundred percent of myself to my art, and my art has repaid me.
-Alexandra Danilova
Most fine artists know that at any stage they never really express their vision completely. Young, they reach for the impossible and for a rare moment or two almost graze it. Mature, they may be getting closer to the bone of their intention in spite of weaker technical resources. There are strengths at either end of the spectrum of time, and we the audience need all of it. -Daniel Nagrin
All there is to be said for work as opposed to dancing is that it is so much easier. -Heywood Brown
Ballet technique is arbitrary and very difficult. It never becomes easy: it becomes possible. -Agnes De Mille 
Ballet is not technique, not a way of doing things, but a means of expression that comes perhaps more closely to the inner language of man than any other. -George Borodin
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
I don't want people who want to dance, I want people who have to dance. -George Balanchine
Some years ago, in a dancing contest at Jerez de la Frontera, an old lady of eighty, competing against beautiful women and young girls with waists supple as water, carried off the prize merely by the act of raising her arms, throwing back her head, and stamping the little platform with a blow of her feet; but in the conclave of muses and angels foregathered there beauties of form and beauties of smile the dying Duende triumphed as it had to, trailing the rusted knife blades of its wings along the ground. -Federico Garcia Lorca |
