“If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk, you can sing.”
- Zimbabwean proverb

“Nobody comes out of their mother’s womb doing cucarachas.”
- Donnie Burns

“Music begins to atrophy when it parts too far from dance.”
- Ezra Pound

“I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.”
- Mikhail Baryshnikov

“Beginning dancer: knows nothing.
Intermediate dancer: knows everything; too good to dance with beginners.
Hotshot dancer: too good to dance with anyone.
Advanced dancer: Dances everything. Especially with beginners”
- Attributed to Richard Crum (folk dance instructor)

“The one unbreakable rule of couples dancing is that the partners must move interdependently, as a unit.”
- Anonymous

“Master technique and then forget about it and be natural.”
- Anna Pavlova

“We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.”
- Japanese proverb

“You haven’t got anything to dance about until you’re over thirty-five anyway.”
- Bert Balladine

“Basic dance–and I should qualify the word basic–is primarily concerned with motion. So immediately you will say but the basketball player is concerned with motion. That is so–but he is not concerned with it primarily. His action is a means towards an end beyond motion. In basic dance the motion is its own end–that is, it is concerned with nothing beyond itself.”
- Alwin Nikolais

“Dancing should look easy; like an optical illusion. It should seem effortless. When you do a difficult variation, the audience is aware that it is demanding and that you have the power and strength to do it. But in the end, when you take your bow, you should look as if you were saying, ‘Oh, it was nothing. I could do it again.’”
- Bruce Marks

“There is nothing so necessary for men as dancing…Without dancing a man can do nothing…All the disasters of mankind, all the fatal misfortunes that histories are so full of, the blunders of politicians, the miscarriages of great commanders, all this comes from want of skill in dancing…”
- Moliere’s Dancing Master

“I have no desire to prove anything by dancing. I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance. I just put my feet in the air and move them around.”
- Fred Astaire