Top 30 George Balanchine Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Dance is music made visible.”

— George Balanchine

Featured in: Aesthetic Quotes, Dance Quotes

2. “See the music, hear the dance.”

— George Balanchine

Featured in: Aesthetic Quotes, Dance Quotes

3. “What are you waiting for? What are you saving for? Now is all there is.”

— George Balanchine

4. “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

5. “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

6. “First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty if you’re very lucky and have said your prayers.”

— George Balanchine

7. “The mirror is not you. The mirror is you looking at yourself.”

— George Balanchine

8. “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

9. “I’ve got more energy now than when I was younger because I know exactly what I want to do.”

— George Balanchine

10. “I don’t want people who want to dance, I want people who have to dance.”

— George Balanchine

11. “Music must be seen, and dance must be heard.”

— George Balanchine

12. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

13. “Choreography is simpler than you think. Just go and do, and don’t think so much about it. Just make something interesting.”

— George Balanchine

14. “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

15. “Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.”

— George Balanchine

16. “Your eyes is camera and your brain is a file cabinet.”

— George Balanchine

17. “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

18. “I cannot move, I cannot even want to move, unless I hear the music first.”

— George Balanchine

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

19. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

20. “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

21. “I am a cloud – in trousers.”

— George Balanchine

22. “Ballet is important and significant – yes. But first of all, it is a pleasure.”

— George Balanchine

23. “Ballet will speak for itself. About itself.”

— George Balanchine

24. “They are poets of gesture.”

— George Balanchine

25. “Most ballet teachers in the United States are terrible. If they were in medicine, everyone would be poisoned.”

— George Balanchine

26. “The woman’s function is to fascinate men.”

— George Balanchine

27. “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

28. “My muse must come to me on union time.”

— George Balanchine

29. “The pointes for girls, I always say, have to be like an elephant’s trunk; strong and yet flexible and soft.”

— George Balanchine

Featured in: Strong Quotes

30. “I have no literary approach – except to literature.”

— George Balanchine