A lot of people, they want it all to be fuzzy and warm and cosmic, but it’s no different with a horse than with a kid…You can’t always be the kid’s best friend. First you have to be the parent.
Buck Brannaman
At each stage of work the horse must be taken to his limit, but never over the limit.
Walter Zettl
The horse knows where the person is all the time. Now we are trying to help the person know where the horse is all the time. The horse knows where the person is; the person needs to learn to catch up with the horse on that.
Tom Dorrance
Once the horse gets to responding, then you try to get the response you are asking for with less. You try to cut down what you are applying and get more response with less pressure, until it almost gets to be just a thought.
Tom Dorrance
We are fallible. We certainly haven’t attained perfection. But we can strive for it, and the virtue is in the striving.
Carlos P. Romulo
I’ve always wanted to do the right thing by a horse, that’s never changed, its just that as my knowledge grew I’ve been able to offer the horse a better human being.
Buck Brannaman
The horse will become supple when it is cadenced, stiff when it rushes.
Nuno Oliveira
When the horse is standing, before you reach to ask him to go forward or back, or turn right or left; before you ask him, have a picture in your mind of what you are going to ask him to do, and how you expect him to respond before you start.
Tom Dorrance
The goal of all dressage riding should be to bring the horse and rider together in harmony…a oneness of balance, purpose, and athletic expression.
Walter Zettl
Now when the whole horse is together, he will feel good to you, I am sure. All we are trying to do is to fix these things up to where he can find them, then it’s the horse’s idea. But that is a little easier said than done.
Tom Dorrance
