Daily Inspiration Quote by Ninette de Valois

De Valois is arguing for cultural porosity with the practical authority of someone who built an art form out of imports. As the Irish-born founder of what became the Royal Ballet, she understood that “national” culture is rarely homegrown; it’s curated, translated, and relentlessly borrowed. The line starts with a cool-eyed concession to reality: you can be “influenced” at the border, but you can’t actually seal it. That’s less utopian than it sounds. It’s the voice of a working artist describing how ideas, bodies, and styles move whether governments like it or not.

The rhetorical turn is the jab: “you shouldn’t.” Not because mixing is morally pure, but because it’s aesthetically and socially generative. Her key word is “interesting” - a deliberately unsentimental standard. She’s not pleading for tolerance; she’s insisting that homogeneity is boring and, for the arts, lethal.

“We all get muddled up together” is doing subtle work. “Muddled” admits mess, miscommunication, even dilution; she doesn’t romanticize fusion as clean or equal. Yet the outcome “produce something that belongs to everyone” reframes ownership away from bloodline and toward participation. In a century marked by tightened borders, nationalism, and mass displacement, de Valois offers a counter-account: culture grows through friction and remix, and the most durable creations are the ones no single group can claim without lying.