Top 9 Quotes & Sayings by Lincoln Kirstein

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Lincoln Kirstein.

Last updated on December 22, 2024.

Lincoln Edward Kirstein was an American writer, impresario, art connoisseur, philanthropist, and cultural figure in New York City, noted especially as co-founder of the New York City Ballet. He developed and sustained the company with his organizing ability and fundraising for more than four decades, serving as the company's general director from 1946 to 1989. According to the New York Times, he was "an expert in many fields", organizing art exhibits and lecture tours in the same years.

American - Writer | May 4, 1907 - January 5, 1996

Source: Wikipedia

Transplanting the ballet to the United States is like trying to raise a palm tree in Dakota.

Lincoln Kirstein

In liberal democracy and anxious anarchy, the traditional classic dance, compact of aristocratic authority and absolute freedom in a necessity of order, has never been so promising as an independent expression as it is today.

Lincoln Kirstein

She was chronologically in luck. She corresponded to necessity.

Lincoln Kirstein

Ballet dancers are a self-chosen elite. To survive and surmount years of disciplinary preparation and seasons of even more arduous performance requires rigid determination and almost mindless self-abnegation. One other factor is difficult to predetermine: without a certain admixture of hysteria - sometimes masking as self-obsession, sometimes even counterfeiting incipient madness - performers, at once acrobats, artists, and animals, make little public impression.

Lincoln Kirstein

While photography to Cartier-Bresson is constantly an intuitive process, it is never purely instinctive. It is founded on continuous intellection, on ceaseless consideration during all moments previous to, or preparatory for, the pressing. It does not only operate in the blinding flash of a moment seized; it works all the time. The snatched picture merely cuts across the vein of observable incident or accident which is always beating, whether or not the fingers actually press.

Lincoln Kirstein

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

The candid camera is the greatest liar in the photographic family.... It is anarchic, naïve, and superficial.

Lincoln Kirstein

The domain of the ballet dancer is not earth but air.

Lincoln Kirstein

Dance design is not simply one element; it is that without which ballet cannot exist. As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color to painting, so sequence in steps - their syntax, idiom, vocabulary - are the stuff of stage dancing.

Lincoln Kirstein

Top 9 Quotes & Sayings by Lincoln Kirstein

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