Daily Inspiration Quote by George Balanchine

Balanchine opens with a provocation that sounds humble but lands as a quiet flex: God makes worlds; I make ballet out of whatever the world gives me. It’s a refusal of the Romantic myth of the choreographer as solitary genius channeling pure invention. Instead, he casts himself as an arranger, a ruthless editor, a connoisseur of found objects. In an art form obsessed with lineage and “purity,” that admission is almost punk.

The line “I assemble and I steal everywhere” isn’t confessional so much as instructional. Balanchine is telling you how taste works: it’s not the possession of ideas, it’s the ability to recognize what can be lifted, recombined, and sharpened into form. The theft he describes isn’t merely borrowing steps. It’s taking from bodies (“what the dancers can do”), from observation, from other makers, then translating it into his own grammar. That emphasis on dancers matters. Ballet often treats performers as instruments; Balanchine admits the instrument changes the music. His “creation” is inseparable from the particular ankles, speed, musicality, and daring in front of him.

Context gives the quote extra bite. Balanchine helped define neoclassical ballet in America, building a new canon while constantly cannibalizing old ones: Russian school discipline, French clarity, Broadway brashness, Stravinsky’s architecture. He frames that eclecticism as ethical realism, not scandal. The subtext: originality isn’t purity, it’s selection under pressure. If you want to understand why Balanchine’s work feels modern, start here: he treats art less like revelation and more like high-level remixing, done with absolute seriousness.