Dance Quotes are a great way to not only become and remain inspired yourself but also to motivate your students. Somehow it is helpful to hear quotes by dancers from former times. I like to give my older students one quote a week that they write in their dance notebooks, something I encourage them to bring to every class. It is impossible to remember all your corrections without writing them down and I also like to give my students handouts with nutritional advice and anatomy information to help them understand how their bodies function to the best level. Once they have the quote I ask them to find out about the author.

Here are some of my favorite quotes that you can print out to give to your students :

"It's (dance) your pulse, it's your heartbeat, it's your breathing. It's the rhythms of your life. It's the expression in time and movement of happiness and joy and sadness and energy. It's a venting of energy. It's extraordinary, and that's common to all the cultures and it's common to all individuals."

Jaques D'Amboise

(Artistic Director, National Dance Institute)

"If we seek the real source of dance, if we go to nature, we find that the dance of the future is the dance of the past, the dance of eternity, and has been and will always be the same."

Isadora Duncan (1878-1927)

"Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing."

Freidrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"For every prima ballerina assoluta, there are several dozen members of the corps. But if you want to dance you don't care if you never even get to be a cygnet"

Jesse O'Neill

"The small child at dancing class may never become a professional dancer - but the courtesies and disciplines, as well as the joy in movement, will touch her forever."

Helen Thompson, (b. 1943)

"The value of the dance, its greatest value, is in the intangibles. Success in the dance cannot be measured by a tape, weighed on scales, nor timed with a stopwatch. It demands an awareness and sensitivity in the dancer's soul and in the soul of the beholder who partakes, vicariously, emphatically, in the dance."

Ted Shawn (1891-1972)

"All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the movement important, vital and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused."

Martha Graham (1893-1992)

"Nothing has ever taken its (ballet's) place for disciplinary training. There is no technique in any other style of dancing that is so valuable for producing exactitude, precision, sense of form and sense of line."

Ted Shawn (1891-1972)

"Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike."

Margot Fonteyn (1919-1992)

"Dance is fun! It lifts the spirit, strengthens the body, and stimulates the mind…"

Wayne Sleep (b. 1948)