Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's what I always wanted to do, to show the laughter, the fun, the joy of dance.
Freedom to a dancer means discipline. That is what technique is for -- liberation.
I believe one thing: that today is yesterday and tomorrow is today and you can't stop.
The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.
Modern dance isn't anything except one thing in my mind: the freedom of women in America.
The gesture is the thing truly expressive of the individual - as we think so will we act.
No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.
No animal ever has an ugly body until it is domesticated. It is the same with the human body.
I want to make people feel intensely alive. I'd rather have them against me than indifferent.
Theater used to be a verb; it used to be an act. But nowadays it is just a noun. It is a place.
Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.
Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it.
Dance is communication, and so the great challenge is to speak clearly, beautifully and with inevitability.
Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are great because of their passion.
You see, when weaving a blanket, an Indian woman leaves a flaw in the weaving of that blanket to let the soul out.
My dancing is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement.
We are all of us, unique - each a unique pattern of creativity and if we do not fulfill it, it is lost for all time.
There is a force, a quickness that is translated through you into action. If you block it, the world will not have it.
Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can.
The reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol of the performance of living.
I don't think in art there is ever a precedent; each moment is a new one and terrifying and threatening and bursting with hope.
Dancers today can do anything; the technique is phenomenal. The passion and the meaning to their movement can be another thing.
In a dancer, there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength.
To me, a building - if it's beautiful - is the love of one man, he's made it out of his love for space, materials, things like that.
I'd rather an audience like me than dislike me, but I'd rather they disliked me than be apathetic, because that is the kiss of death.
People have asked me why I chose to be a dancer. I did not choose. I was chosen to be a dancer, and with that, you live all your life.
I am absorbed in the magic of movement and light. Movement never lies. It is the magic of what I call the outer space of the imagination.
Sometimes it's blood memory... not the blood your mother and father gave you... but that which stretches back two or three thousand years.
Looking at the past is like lolling in a rocking chair. It is so relaxing and you can rock back and forth on the porch, and never go forward.
One can always lament, you know — but to laugh in the face of life, that's very hard. And for me the great tragedian should also be a great comedian.
You give all your life to doing this one thing. It sounds grim, it sounds frightening - it isn't - it has a great gaiety at times and a great wonder.
All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.
Think of the magic of that foot, comparatively small, upon which your whole weight rests. It's a miracle, and the dance is a celebration of that miracle.
If you feel depressed you shouldn't go out on the street because it will show on your face and you'll give it to others. Misery is a communicable disease.
I am certain that movement never lies. There is only one law of posture I have been able to discover - the perpendicular line connecting heaven and earth.
Dancers have more bones than most people and on the days when you work hard you are sure that you have somehow accumulated more bones than you started with.
The body is a sacred garment. It's your first and last garment; it is what you enter life in and what you depart life with, and it should be treated with honor.
A dancer must listen to his body and pay homage to it. Behind the movement lies this terrible, driving passion, this necessity. I won't settle for anything less.
You can be Eastern or Burmese or what have you, but the function of the body and the awareness of the body results in dance and you become a dancer, not just a human being.
Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery - what it all means, the way the little bone near the ankle relates itself to the floor for a perfect stance, a perfect plie.
It takes ten years, usually, to make a dancer. It takes ten years of handling the instrument, handling the material with which you are dealing, for you to know it completely.
At the time I started in ballet they were dancing 'The Spirit of Champagne' on pointe, in Paris. I thought, 'I don't want to dance the spirit of champagne, I want to drink it!
Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart. The instrument through which the dance speaks is also the instrument through which life is lived ... the human body.
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.
I feel that the essence of dance is the expression of man--the landscape of his soul. I hope that every dance I do reveals something of myself or some wonderful thing a human can be.
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 of time, this expression is unique.
All things I do are in every woman. Every woman is Medea. Every woman is Jocasta. There comes a time when a woman is a mother to her husband. Clytemnestra is every woman when she kills.
I use the words gods and goddesses principally, I think, to mean beautiful bodies - bodies that are absolute instruments. And I believe in discipline, I believe in a very definite technique.