George Balanchine Quotes

Figure skating, especially the longer performances, are such a feat. It requires so much stamina and is so beautiful.

When I was still a student, I came out of a performing arts high school, and the female students who were doing traditional dance and ballet were so beautiful. They were beautiful, starting from their postures.

Where one should see only what is beautiful, our public looks only for what is true.

What brought me to the theater, no matter you're a Jew or a Russian or Armenian or Latvian, are suddenly illuminated by stage light and one beautiful image of dance.

I had danced when I was younger, until I was about 12, and I always idealized it, as most young girls do, as the most beautiful art. It's an expression without words.

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 was pirouette and flourish, I was filigree and flame. How could I count my blessings when I didn't know their names?

For something to be beautiful it doesn’t have to be pretty.

The greater the length, the more beautiful will the piece be by reason of its size, provided that the whole be perspicuous.

Ballet is a riddle of means and ends.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread.

Christian is going to be the strongest man in the NBA next year, because all he's been doing all summer is carrying around the luggage for 11 guys.

I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.

Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.

In the performer's body, you don't care how you look. It doesn't matter if you're old, fat, beautiful, or ugly. It doesn't change anything. The only thing is your charisma and how you express your idea.

Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.

He moves like a dancer.

The most beautiful colors laid on at random, give less pleasure than a black-and-white drawing.

Today it’s economically crucial and personally rewarding to create something that is also beautiful, whimsical, or emotionally engaging.

Fashion: a beautiful thing that becomes ugly. Art: an ugly thing that becomes beautiful.

The ballet. I saw in the fugitive beauty of a dancer's gesture a symbol of life. It was achieved at the cost of unending effort but, with all the forces of gravity against it, a fleeting poise in mid-air, a lovely attitude worthy to be made immortal in a bas-relief, it was lost as soon as it was gained and there remained no more than the memory of an exquisite emotion. So life, lived variously and largely, becomes a work of art only when brought to its beautiful conclusion and is reduced to nothingness in the moment when it arrives at perfection.

What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture?

Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

I am sure that there is no place in the world where your message would not be enhanced by your making the place (whether tiny or large, a hut or a palace) orderly, artistic and beautiful with some form of creativity, some form of ‘art’ (p. 213).

Could you do such things when you were a dancer?' Tara asks her, as Tsukiko pulls a leg up impossibly far over her head. 'I would have had a much busier social calendar if I could,' Mme. Padva replies with a shake of her head.