Quotes About Ballet

I began dancing when I was 7 years old. I was told that I had the perfect ballet dancers body and had these crazy high arches in my feet that resulted in an amazing point. Ballet was very disciplined and, frankly, a little boring, so I eventually transitioned to gymnastics. I loved that, although I never reached a competitive level.

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.

Coco Chanel was always doing things with ballet, so it is a tradition clashing fashion and ballet.

I wanted to be a dancer from when I was about nine or something like that and started ballet. I used to really like it and got into it and did it full time for a couple of years. I did a lot of ballet but I traded that in for acting when I was about 15.

Mum, who had been a dancer with a small ballet company before she got married, was full of encouragement. She didn't say, "This is really good, you should do this", She just encouraged us to do whatever we liked.

I wanted to be a ballet teacher.

Ballet is good, because it makes you stand up tall.

Ballet is the fairies' baseball.

I took several years of dance lessons that included ballet, tap and jazz. They helped a great deal with body control, balance, a sense of rhythm, and timing.

Does the New York City Ballet affect other places? Yeah, it lets people know they should come to New York.

In terms of withstanding incredible amounts of pain - both physical and emotional - I don't think there's any better training than ballet.

I had to quit ballet because it felt like a part of me was dying inside.

Ballet is only good when it is great.

The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.

I'm the first one out on the dance floor. In college I had to take jazz, ballet and tap dancing, but, before that, it was just social.

I am very obsessed with ballet now because it is a very difficult sport and a beautiful one because it is not about money. It's not like playing football or tennis - dance has no sponsors, it's just for the beauty. Maybe it is the only last pure sport.

The cat crossed the street daintily, pointing his feet like a ballet dancer, lifting them high as if his feet were too good for the pavement.

I used to dance for seventeen years -classical ballet, which was very disciplined. I like yoga and Pilates, but I don't have the discipline to go to the gym.

Wrestling is ballet with violence.

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.

I trained as a ballet dancer - well, I started when I was two and a half, and was serious about it from when I was eight until I was 18.

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?

I hated the ballet, but I liked performing. I did 20 shows, and I couldn't get the smile off my face.

From the age of four, I loved ballet and tap. I was in the school band, the choir, and all my school plays.

The real American type can never be a ballet dancer. The legs are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too free for this school of affected grace and toe walking.

Ballet is more than a profession - it is a way of life.

Tennis is more than just a sport. It's an art, like the ballet. Or like a performance in the theater. When I step on the court I feel like Anna Pavlova. Or like Adelina Patti. Or even like Sarah Bernhardt. I see the footlights in front of me. I hear the whisperings of the audience. I feel an icy shudder. Win or die! Now or never! It's the crisis of my life.

With classical ballet you are literally injuring yourself.

I think that taking ballet is one of the best things a girl can do. Period.

Bel canto is to opera what pole-vaulting is to ballet.

I wanted to give people - which is fairly bizarre considering my whole life is contemporary dance really - I wanted to give people a really fulfilling sense that they had seen a white classical ballet - in a very pure form.

The New York City Ballet is obviously speaking to a whole new generation and bringing it the same wonder and beauty that it brought previous generations

Baseball is a ballet without music. Drama without words.

I wanted to be a ballerina. I studied ballet for 19 years.

Ballet is not just my profession, it is my life ... It is horrible for me to think that one day it will all finish.

I was called a bookish child. Mother sent me to a ballet teacher in Cincinnati when I was nine years old. I guess I was an awkward child and the family wanted me to be graceful. When I found out I liked to dance and people seemed to like to watch me, I was determined to go places.

If a ballet dancer falls over, it's knowing how to get out looking clumsy that counts.

I used to get so comfortable running the hurdles, I was just like a ballet dancer going out there and going through the routines.

When I'm doing well, it's like I'm in a nice little ballet. Everything is going slow all around me. It's very peaceful.

Pilates is my favorite core strengthener. I do it three or four times a week. With all the strengthening and lengthening, it's like ballet. Plus, you get to do it lying down!

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.

There's an opera out on the turnpike, there's a ballet being fought out in the alley.

Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, so is the ballet.

You realize you can get good at something, even though ballet almost felt like you could never be good enough. No matter how hard you worked, it was so hard to be a great dancer.

You invest into the future, and that's how young people become human in best sense of it - through the great experience of listening a Müller symphony or to see a great play by Tennessee Williams, experience something in a ballet, in a film.

Boxing is my real passion. I can go to ballet, theatre, movies, or other sporting events... and nothing is like the fights to me. I'm excited by the visual beauty of it. A boxer can look so spectacular by doing a good job.

I have a sister who is a dancer and dance teacher. We grew up dancing together. I wanted to become a ballerina when I was a kid, so she and I were always at ballet conservatories and going to school with our hair in buns.

I had seen the ballet of Swan Lake as a child but it was as an adult, when I saw a production featuring Erik Bruhn, that I first noticed how significant a part the ever-present threat of violence played. This juxtaposition of great beauty and grace with a backdrop of pure evil stayed with me for years.