100+ Dance Quotes We Love For Dancers

Ballerina in white tutu sitting on stage

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Whether you are looking for the perfect dance quotes to motivate and inspire your dancer or dance quotes to celebrate the strength and beauty of dancers, there is the perfect quote for you. Dance is a process, sometimes a frustrating process, but finding the right words, can help encourage and celebrate your dancer. 

Inspirational Dance Quotes

  • “If you can’t stop thinking about it, don’t stop working for it.” -unknown
  • “Be the girl who decided to go for it.”
  • “You can do anything you want, even if you are being told negative things….stay strong and find motivation” -Misty Copeland
  • “Be fearless in the pursuit of what sets your soul on fire.” -unknown
  • “Stop letting who you are, talk you out of who you are becoming.” -unknown
  • “If you’re tired of starting over, stop giving up.” – unknown
  • “You don’t have to be perfect to be amazing” -unknown
  • “Your only limit is your mind.” -unknown
  • Do not wait until all the conditions are perfect to begin. Beginning makes the conditions perfect.” -Alan Cohen
  • “Discipline will take you places motivation can’t.” -unknown
  • “Just because you need to rest doesn’t mean you don’t have a strong work ethic. Just because you need a break, doesn’t mean you are a quitter.” -Francisco Gella
  • “Set goals, not limits” -unknown
  • “Aspire to inspire” -unknown
  • “Dancers are the athletes of God.” -Albert Einstein
  • “May you measure your progress by how far you have come, not by how far ahead are from you.” -Dhiman
  • “Life Happens, Dance Helps” -unknown
  • “The comeback is always stronger than the setback.” -unknown
  • “If you are persistent, you will get it. If you are consistent, you will keep it.” -unknown
  • “I didn’t come this far, to only come this far.” -unknown
  • “Dreams demand hustle” -unknown
  • “They said she couldn’t, so she did.” -unknown
  • “Just because my path is different, doesn’t mean I’m lost.” – unknown
  • “Don’t downgrade your dream to fit your reality, upgrade your conviction to match your destiny.” -unknown
  • “You will only fail if you give up on yourself.” -unknown

Practical Dance Quotes and Advice

  • “Good technique never goes out of style.” – unknown
  • “The artist is nothing without the gift. But the gift is nothing without the work.” -Emilie Zola
  • “There are only two options: make progress or make excuses.”  -unknown
  • “Eliminate what doesn’t help you evolve.” -unknown
  • “When you dance, you can enjoy the luxury of being you.” -Paulo Coelho
  • “They call it dancing.  We call it living.” -unknown
  • “Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire” -George Bernard Shaw
  • “Practice as if you are the worst.  Perform as if you are the best.”  – unknown
  • “Being the hardest worker in the room includes the time you’re waiting for your turn while standing off to the side of the studio.” -Francisco Gella
  • “The only dancer you should compare yourself to, is the one you used to be.”  – unknown
  • “Dance is music made visible.” – Unknown
  • “You know you’re dancing when tears of pain and happiness blend in with your sweat. -Unknown
  • “Dancers are instruments, like an instrument the choreographer plays.” – unknown
  • “The world is my stage.” – unknown
  • “And if the music is good, you dance.” – unknown
  • “Dance like no one is watching.” – unknown
  • “Dancers dream with their feet.” – unknown
  • “Life is a dance from one stage to the next.”  – Unknown

Dance Quotes by Famous Dancers and Choreographers

  • “Great dancers are not great because of their technique.  They are great because of their passion” -Martha Graham
  • “To touch, to move, to inspire, this is the true gift of dance.”  – Aubrey Lynch
  • “Dancing is a feeling expressed from the inside out.” – Mia Michaels
  • “Out of limitations, comes creativity.”  – Debbie Allen
  • “The path to your success is not as fixed and inflexible as you think.” -Misty Copeland
  • “The creative process is not controlled by a switch you turn on and off; it’s with you all the time.” – Alvin Ailey
  • “We should consider every day lost in which we have not danced once.”  – Friedrich Nietzsche
  • “It’s not who you are that holds you back.  It’s who you think you are not.” – Denis Waitley
  • “Life is the dancer and you are the dance.”  – Eckhart Tolle
  • “I’m attracted to long-legged girls with long arms and a little head.” – Alvin Ailey
  • “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
  • “Optimist:  Someone who figures that taking a step backwards after taking a step forwards is not a disaster.  It’s a cha-cha.”  – Robert Brault
  • “You can find a pretty body anywhere…….what makes a dancer a true dancer is what they make of all of that on stage, and what they bring to the audience” -Misty Copeland
  • “The dancer’s body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul.” -Isadora Duncan
  • “No matter what you write or choreograph, you feel it is not enough.”  – Alvin Ailey
  • “Dancers are the messengers of the Gods.” -Martha Graham
  • “In life as in dance:  Grace glides in on blistered feet.”  – Alice Abrams
  • “There are shortcuts to happiness and dancing is one of them.” – unknown
  • “If you dance with your heart, your body will follow.”  – Mia Michaels
  • “Those who dance are considered insane by those who can’t hear the music.”  – George Carlin
  • “To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful.” -Agnes De Mille
  • “When you dance, your purpose is not to get to a certain place on the floor. It’s to enjoy each step along the way.” – Wayne Dyer
  • “Dance is your pulse, your heartbeat, your breathing. It’s the rhythm of life. It’s the expression in time and movement, in happiness, joy, sadness, and envy.” — Jacques d’Amboise
  • “It takes an athlete to dance, but an artist to be a dancer. ” – Shannon LaFleur
  • “Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.” -Ted Shawn
  • “Where there is no heart, there is no art.”  – Anna Pavlova
  • “Any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all” -Lynda Barr
  • “Master technique and then forget about it and be natural. “- Anna Pavlova
  • “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” – Edgar Degas
  • “Don’t be afraid to be amazing.” – Andy Offutt Irwin
  • “Dance is bigger than the physical body. Think bigger than that. When you extend your arm, it doesn’t stop at the end of your fingers, because you’re dancing bigger than that: you’re dancing spirit.” – Judith Jamison
  • “Some dancers dream about successful careers…and some dancers wake up and do the hard work that’s necessary to achieve them.” –  Grover Dale
  • “Think later. It’s the natural order.” -Samuel Beckett 
  • “I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.” – Mikhail Baryshnikov
  • “Choreography is mentally draining, but there’s a pleasure in getting in the studio with dancers and the music.”  – Alvin Ailey
  • “Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.” – Kurt Vonnegut
  • “Awesome dancers have discovered the inner passion that transforms their movement into art.”  – Rhee Gold
  • “Dance from your heart and love your music and the audience will love you in return.”  – Marie Tallchief
  • “Do it big, do it right and do it with style.” – Fred Astaire
  • “No one can arrive from being talented alone, work transforms talent into genius.”  – Anna Pavlova
  • “Opportunity dances with those who are already on the dance floor.”  – Jackson Browne
  • “God gives talent.  Work transforms talent into genius.”  – Anna Pavlova
  • “You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled then something has been lost.” -Martha Graham
  • “Dance to the light that is your soul.” – Jendayi
  • “Dance is a song of the body. Either of joy or pain.” -Martha Graham
  • “Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience.” -Lyall Watson
  • “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.”  – Tim Notke
  • “Dance training is life training.” – Joe Tremaine
  • “After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.” — Ann Richards
  • “I don’t want dancers who want to dance.  I want dancers who have to dance.” – George Balanchine 
  • “No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we should have all been in another business.”  – Mikhail Baryshnikov
  • “The trained dancer must not only have grace and elegance, but also the leap of an Olympic hurdler, the balance of a tight-rope walker and panther-like strength and agility.” – Camilla Jessel
  •  “Dancing is creating a sculpture that is visible only for a moment.” Erol Ozan
  • “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
  • “The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion.”
  • “The more injuries you get, the smarter you get.”  – Mikhail Baryshnikov
  • “He who cannot dance puts the blame on the floor.” — Hindu Proverb
  • “I’m not interested in a group of people with some sort of incredible homogeny,a group that can do the movement I want.  I’m interested in people whocan take the movement somewhere.” – Graeme Murphy
  • “Nobody is born a dancer.”  – Mikhail Baryshnikov
  • “Dances without purpose have false starts and stops.” – Hanya Holm
  • “The job of feet is walking, but their hobby is dancing.” Amit Kalantri
  • “Dance is the hidden language of the soul.” -Martha Graham
  • “Many other women kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.” -Agnes De Mille
  • “Choreography is simpler than you think.  Just go and do, and don’t think so much about it.  Just make something  interesting.”   – George Balanchine
  • “Good choreography fuses eye, ear and mind.”  – Arlene Croce
  • “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls.” -Merce Cunningham 
  • “You dance love, and you dance joy, and you dance dreams. And I know if I can make you smile by jumping over a couple of couches or running through a rainstorm, then I’ll be very glad to be a song and dance man.” Gene Kelly
  • “No artist is ahead of his time.  He is his time; it’s just that others are behind the times.”  -Martha Graham
  • “Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.” – George Balanchine
  • “The body never lies.”  -Martha Graham
  • “Dancing is the poetry of the foot.” -John Dryden
  • “There are short-cuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.” – Vicki Baum
  • “The only sin is mediocrity.”  -Martha Graham
  • “Hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, they danced by the light of the moon.” -Edward Lear
  • “A child sings before it speaks, dances almost before it walks. Music is in our hearts from the beginning.” – Pamela Brown 
  • “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.” -Merce Cunningham
What are your favorite dance quotes?

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