Top 40 Quotes & Sayings by George Balanchine

Most ballet teachers in the United States are terrible. If they were in medicine, everyone would be poisoned.

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

The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.

In my ballets, woman is first. Men are consorts. God made men to sing the praises of women. They are not equal to men: They are better.

In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell... we can't dance synonyms.

One is born to be a great dancer.

I've got more energy now than when I was younger because I know exactly what I want to do.

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.' I have never prided myself on having an unusually gifted pupil. A Pavlova is no one's pupil but God's.

Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.

Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policeman, always alert, always tense. But I don't agree with that because policeman don't have to look beautiful at the same time.

See the music, hear the dance.

In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell. We can't dance synonyms.

My muse must come to me on union time.

Ballet will speak for itself. About itself.

I cannot move, I cannot even want to move, unless I hear the music first.

Music must be seen, and dance must be heard

I can always invent movement, and sometimes it can be fitted into the right place, but that is not choreography. It is the music that dictates the whole shape of the work. I do not believe in the permanence of anything in ballet save the purely classical.

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

What are you waiting for? What are you saving for? Now is all there is.

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.

The woman's function is to fascinate men.

Why are you stingy with yourselves? Why are you holding back? What are you saving for - for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.

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?

We must first realize that dancing is an absolutely independent art, not merely a secondary accompanying one. I believe that it is one of the great arts. . . . The important thing in ballet is the movement itself. A ballet may contain a story, but the visual spectacle . . . is the essential element. 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.

First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty if you're very lucky and have said your prayers.

Dance is music made visible

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

If you don't feel challenged, it's because you're not doing enough. Ballet should never feel comfortable. Comfortable is lazy! If you're comfortable when you dance, you're not pushing yourself hard enough. 100 % is not enough. You have to give 200%. One tendu takes years of hard work and will never be perfect. Everything in ballet is a challenge.

Your eyes is camera and your brain is a file cabinet.

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.

Ballet is important and significant - yes. But first of all, it is a pleasure.

They are poets of gesture.

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.

I have no literary approach - except to literature.

I don't want people who want to dance; I want people who have to dance.

Storyless is not abstract. Two dancers on the stage are enough material for a story; for me, they are already a story in themselves

I am a cloud - in trousers.

The pointes for girls, I always say, have to be like an elephant's trunk; strong and yet flexible and soft.

I don't have a past. I have a continuous present. The past is part of the present, just as the future is. We exist in time.

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