Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by George Balanchine, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring George Balanchine quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 34 George Balanchine quotes for you to read and share.
In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell ... we can't dance synonyms. -- George Balanchine
Ballet will speak for itself. About itself. -- George Balanchine
The pointes for girls, I always say, have to be like an elephant's trunk; strong and yet flexible and soft. -- George Balanchine
One is born to be a great dancer. -- George Balanchine
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. -- George Balanchine
Choreography is simpler than you think. Just go and do, and don't think so much about it. Just make something interesting. -- George Balanchine
Most ballet teachers in the United States are terrible. If they were in medicine, everyone would be poisoned. -- George Balanchine
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. -- George Balanchine
Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays. -- George Balanchine
Your eyes is camera and your brain is a file cabinet. -- George Balanchine
The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener. -- George Balanchine
I have no literary approach - except to literature. -- George Balanchine
They are poets of gesture. -- George Balanchine
I don't want people who want to dance, I want people who have to dance. -- George Balanchine
Dance is music made visible -- George Balanchine
The mirror is not you. The mirror is you looking at yourself. -- George Balanchine
The woman's function is to fascinate men. -- George Balanchine
I cannot move, I cannot even want to move, unless I hear the music first. -- George Balanchine
Music must be seen, and dance must be heard -- George Balanchine
First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty if you're very lucky and have said your prayers. -- George Balanchine
I am a cloud - in trousers. -- George Balanchine
Ballet is important and significant - yes. But first of all, it is a pleasure. -- George Balanchine
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. -- George Balanchine
I've got more energy now than when I was younger because I know exactly what I want to do. -- George Balanchine
Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot. -- George Balanchine
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. -- George Balanchine
My muse must come to me on union time. -- George Balanchine
Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policeman, always alert, always tense. But i dont agree with that because policeman don't have to look beautiful at the same time * -- George Balanchine
Storyless is not abstract. Two dancers on the stage are enough material for a story; for me, they are already a story in themselves -- George Balanchine
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. -- George Balanchine
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. -- George Balanchine
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? -- George Balanchine
What are you waiting for? What are you saving for? Now is all there is. -- George Balanchine
See the music, hear the dance. -- George Balanchine