Ninette De Valois Quotes

Classical ballet will never die.

God gave us all exactly the same fingers, arms, legs, and feet, but in our different countries we divided them all a little differently as we feel it, do you understand?

You cannot create genius. All you can do is nurture it.

Hardly any generation wants to take the whole of the last generation, it just wants to take its best bits.

And then you have the classical ballerinas, they're like sopranos. Applied to the dance.

First of all, the most important, that is to learn everything good that has survived from other times, and carefully to watch the bad - and throw it out.

You never advance without losing something en passant... you lose it because you're paying so much attention to the new thing.

Somebody must always be doing something new, or life would get very dull.

As time goes on, all schools only get left alive if they have found something special themselves.

Nothing is done easily, first have the thing, then the thing has a success, then all sorts of difficulties arise through the success.

The smile is the dance of the face - the dance is the smile of the limbs.

You can't dance until you've learnt steps, the things your feet can do.

The best way to study is to go to the Cecchetti method for about a year and draw onto all the highest points and then put that into the general method.

There would never have been a British Ballet without Diaghilev. He had a wonderful influence

Nearly everything in life goes in threes and fours.

No no, we ALL teach each other, whether it's dancing, whether it's singing, whether it's talking, we all listen to each other. That's progress.

It's either not good enough and dies altogether, or it develops.

Diaghilev was the first to notice good character dancers and that sort of thing.

There's nothing in the world that isn't good, bad, and indifferent.

It is a fact that all the ballet's fundamental dance steps are derived from the folk dances of Western Europe.