Brainy Quotes, Brainy Dancers

Recently I came across Brainy Quote, a website devoted to famous people and their “brainy” quotes. Looking up famous dancers, here are some of my favorites…

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
Martha Graham

Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.
Martha Graham

Even though I am a professional, and I know what the steps are, I don’t quite know how I’m going to do them, because I haven’t lived that moment yet. I always feel very insecure and I get very excited.
Suzanne Farrell

I got started dancing because I knew it was one way to meet girls.
Gene Kelly

I danced with passion to spite the music.
Gelsey Kirkland

We were all novices. We really were. We didn’t know a goddamn thing about doing a show.
Jerome Robbins

To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.
Agnes de Mille

The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
Agnes de Mille

The universe lies before you on the floor, in the air, in the mysterious bodies of your dancers, in your mind. From this voyage no one returns poor or weary.
Agnes de Mille

God gives talent. Work transforms talent into genius.
Anna Pavlova

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

One is born to be a great dancer.
George Balanchine

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.
Margot Fonteyn

My dance classes were open to anybody, my only stipulation was that they had to come to the class every day.
Merce Cunningham

I really reject that kind of comparison that says, Oh, he is the best. This is the second best. There is no such thing.
Mikhail Baryshnikov

The creative process is not controlled by a switch you can simply turn on or off; it’s with you all the time.
Alvin Ailey

The dancer’s body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul.
Isadora Duncan

A pas de deux is a dialogue of love. How can there be conversation if one partner is dumb?
Rudolf Nureyev

My feet are dogs.
Rudolf Nureyev

Dance every performance as if it were your last.
Erik Bruhn

One thought on “Brainy Quotes, Brainy Dancers

  1. Ashlyn says:

    I dance because it sets me free from all worries: It makes me feel like I have a purpose in the world when I am on the dance floor. I am focused on every thing when my body is moving to the music.

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