Art & Creativity Quote by Margot Fonteyn

Fonteyn’s line lands with the authority of someone whose entire career depended on making effort look like inevitability. Ballet is a factory for “pretension”: the lacquered roles, the courtly manners, the myth of the ethereal dancer who never sweats, never strains, never bleeds. So when she warns that pretension breeds mediocrity, it’s not a vague plea for authenticity; it’s a working dancer’s diagnosis of what goes wrong onstage and off. Pretension is the extra layer you add to be legible as “serious” or “important,” and that layer is heavy. It clogs timing, blunts musicality, turns a performance into a demonstration.

Her phrasing is quietly brutal. “Find the way” implies that being oneself in art isn’t effortless self-expression; it’s a discipline, a set of choices, a long negotiation between personality and form. In ballet, where individuality is constantly pressed into a standardized silhouette, “being themselves” reads as a radical permission slip: not to abandon technique, but to let technique serve a singular presence rather than a borrowed mask.

The subtext is also moral. Fonteyn links art and life because she’s describing a habit of mind: performing your identity for approval. That’s the surest path to the middle. In an era when dancers were expected to embody idealized femininity and defer to institutions, this is a sharp, almost subversive claim: greatness isn’t the pose of greatness. It’s the unglamorous courage of clarity.