Ballet quotes
347 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside ballet — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"I was used to dancing, but only when someone told you what to do. So in the nightclub I was all over the place, I combined everything. Street dance, modern dance, a bit of jazz and ballet, I was Twyla Tharp, I was Alvin Ailey, I was Michael Jackson. I didn't care, I was free."
"There's no similarity between football and ballet, so this ain't ballet music being played on the field. I'm pumping something that's going to put me in a frame of mind to go to war, and something that's very high tempo and high beat."
"The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body. I don't leap and jump anymore. I look at young dancers, and I am envious, more aware of what glories the body contains. But sensitivity is not made dull by age."
"Don't you think you're quite young?' 'I'm twenty-one,' said Brida. 'If I wanted to start learning ballet, I'd be conseidered too old."
"It is not a question of who dances but of who or what does not dance."
"Transplanting the ballet to the United States is like trying to raise a palm tree in Dakota."
"Let that day be lost to us on which we did not dance once!"
"Of course I was always mad about the ballet russe, mad about it!"
"They were doing the Dying Swan at the ballet. And there was a rumor that some bookmarkers had drifted into town from upstate New York and that they had fixed the bullet. There was a lot of money bet on the swan to live."
"It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things."
"At the time I started in ballet they were dancing 'The Spirit of Champagne' on pointe, in Paris. I thought, 'I don't want to dance the spirit of champagne, I want to drink it!"
"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."
"Sabine gestured to him with the half-eaten crust. "I like him. Not sure why he's wasting his time with the pole dancer, though." Tod laughed out loud and I groaned. "Sophie takes ballet and jazz. She's not a pole dancer." "There's more money in pole dancing," Sabine insisted."
"Never let formal education get in the way of your learning."
"Mostly folk music is people with fruity voices trying to keep alive something old and dead. It's all a bit boring, like ballet: a minority thing kept going by a minority group."
"Great art is never perfect; perfect art is never great."
"I had rather be a kitten and cry mew Than one of these same metre ballet-mongers."
"The domain of the ballet dancer is not earth but air."
"And then he danced,-all foreigners excel the serious Angels in the eloquence of pantomime;-he danced, I say, right well, with emphasis, and a'so with good sense-a thing in footing indispensable: he danced without theatrical pretence, not like a ballet-master in the van of his drill'd nymphs, but like a gentleman."
"I started with ballet and then my cousin Sarah introduced me to her tap teachers."
