Daily Inspiration Quote by George Balanchine

"One is born to be a great dancer" lands like a provocation because it refuses a comforting modern myth: that excellence is mostly grit, access, and hustle. Balanchine isn’t offering a motivational poster; he’s drawing a hard boundary around what he believed the art demands. In ballet, the body is not just an instrument, it’s the premise. Turnout, proportions, pliancy, musicality, coordination, even the nervous system’s appetite for risk and repetition: these aren’t evenly distributed. His line compresses that reality into a chilly little inevitability.

The subtext is power. Spoken by a choreographer-director who shaped the most influential American ballet company, it reads like a gatekeeper’s credo: talent is nature’s credential, and the institution merely recognizes it. That framing absolves the system from scrutiny. If greatness is inborn, then the brutal sorting mechanisms of elite dance - injuries, eating disorders, hierarchies, casting politics - can be filed under fate rather than choice.

It also carries a specific Balanchine agenda. His neoclassical style prized speed, clarity, and an almost athletic attack; he built ballets that rewarded certain bodies and punished others. "Born" becomes shorthand for "born for this aesthetic". Yet the line has a paradoxical tenderness: it honors the uncanny sensation dancers describe when movement feels less like learning and more like remembering. Balanchine’s sentence flatters that feeling while warning everyone else. Greatness, he implies, is not a destination. It’s an identity you either arrive with, or you never quite enter.