Daily Inspiration Quote by Ninette de Valois

It is a dancer's way of smuggling a political argument into anatomy. Ninette de Valois starts with a disarming image of human sameness - the same inventory of limbs - then pivots to the real point: culture doesn't change the body so much as it changes the way we organize it. "Divided them" is the sly verb here. It evokes both choreography (how you segment and coordinate movement) and borders (how nations carve up people, habits, and identities). She makes difference sound less like destiny and more like editing: the same raw material, arranged into distinct sentences.

The line also carries a pedagogical edge. De Valois, who helped found what became Britain's Royal Ballet, spent a lifetime translating traditions: taking classical forms with continental roots and forging a specifically British style. In that context, the quote reads like a rehearsal-room manifesto against essentialism. She's telling a student - or a skeptical audience - that national style isn't mystical "blood" or "temperament". It's training, taste, emphasis: where you place weight, how you shape an arm, which rhythms you privilege.

Invoking God does double duty. It grants her a neutral starting point (no one's body is "better") while quietly undermining nationalist hierarchy. If the equipment is equal, then claims of cultural superiority collapse into choices: who decided this is "correct", who benefits when one way of moving gets treated as universal? The closing "do you understand?" lands like a choreographer's snap: not rhetorical, but insistent. She's demanding that we see culture as technique - learned, embodied, and therefore changeable.