32 Inspiring Exercise Quotes

In a world where motivation to exercise often waxes and wanes, the power of words can be a game-changer. Whether you're a fitness enthusiast or just starting your journey, a few inspiring words can provide the spark needed to lace up those sneakers and get moving. This carefully curated collection of the top 32 inspiring exercise quotes is designed to ignite your passion for fitness and help you overcome any hurdles on your path to a healthier you. Let these quotes be your daily dose of encouragement, propelling you towards achieving your goals and embracing the joy of movement.

1. “Whenever I feel the need to exercise, I lie down until it goes away.” - Paul Terry

2. “My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the heck she is.” - Ellen DeGeneres

3. “...the gym is a kind of wildlife preserve for bodily exertion. A preserve protects species whose habitat is vanishing elsewhere, and the gym (and home gym) accommodates the survival of bodies after the abandonment of the original sites of bodily exertion.” - Rebecca Solnit

4. “A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise.” - A.A. Milne

5. “squats are a form of torture designed by people who don’t need to do squats in the first place” - Nora Roberts

6. “Thinking is like exercise, it requires consistency and rigor. Like barbells in a weightlifting room, the classics force us to either put them down or exert our minds. They require us to think.” - Oliver Van DeMille

7. “I ran three miles, staggered into the lobby, and took the elevator back to my apartment. No point to overdoing this exercise junk. --Stephanie Plum” - Janet Evanovich

8. “If I were to draw on a paper what gym does for me, I would make one dot and then I would erase it.” - Elizabeth Berg

9. “Getting fit is all about mind over matter. I don't mind, so it doesn't matter.” - Adam Hargreaves

10. “Something in the air this morning made me feel like flying. . . "Spring Flight” - Eileen Granfors

11. “Pregnancy does not limit lung function, and both pregnancy and exercise improve the ability of body tissues to take up and utilize oxygen.” - James F. Clapp

12. “So your desire is to do nothing? Well, you shall not have a week, a day, an hour, free from oppression. You shall not be able to lift anything without agony. Every passing minute will make your muscles crack. What is feather to others will be a rock to you. The simplest things will become difficult. Life will become monstrous about you. To come, to go, to breathe, will be so many terrible tasks for you. Your lungs will feel like a hundred-pound weight.” - Victor Hugo

13. “We are going to change the way young people think about fitness.” - Gheorghe Muresan

14. “Books deliver information so that experience has a chance to exercise creativity.” - Richard Diaz

15. “Mum had a Charles-and-Diana wedding mug that had survived longer than the marriage itself. Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. "Gone," she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. "Just like that. All that exercise for nothing." Diana-worship was the nearest thing Mum had to a religion.” - Kate Atkinson

16. “The only pushup you won't be able to do is the one you never do.” - Gwen Ro

17. “Listen for the call of your destiny, and when it comes, release your plans and follow.” - Mollie Marti

18. “I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn't walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. 'Because I have a program for the treadmill,' she explained. 'It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.' It hadn't occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.” - Bill Bryson

19. “Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements.” - Amit Ray

20. “Does breakfast in bed count as a morning workout?” - Elizabeth Jane Howard

21. “Continuous exercise can wear you down and wear you out. What once was a passion has now become just a chore that you dread.” - Helen M. Ryan

22. “Every hour of television that a person watches after the age of twenty-five, the researchers concluded, potentially snips twenty-two minutes off of the viewer's life span.” - Gretchen Reynolds

23. “Drop onto all fours and crawl the length of the court or field, as if you were climbing a wall. This prepares you, too, for light cat burgling, should your athletic career flag.” - Gretchen Reynolds

24. “There was no girls' cross-country team at our high school, since cross-country courses were two or three miles long, and, at that distance, a girl's uterus could fall out.” - Gretchen Reynolds

25. “To resist the frigidity of old age, one must combine the body, the mind, and the heart. And to keep these in parallel vigor one must exercise, study, and love.” - Charles-Victor De Bonstettin

26. “But if sedentary behavior makes us fat and physical activity prevents it, shouldn't the "exercise explosion" and the "new fitness revolution" have launched and epidemic of leanness rather than coinciding with an epidemic of obesity?” - Gary Taubes

27. “Our age has become so mechanical that this has also affected our recreation. People have gotten used to sitting down and watching a movie, a ball game, a television set. It may be good once in a while, but it certainly is not good all the time. Our own faculties, our imagination, our memory, the ability to do things with our mind and our hands–they need to be exercised. If we become too passive, we get dissatisfied.” - Maria von Trapp

28. “Standing in the nordic nook of the kitchen, I can gaze down at the flimsy-limbed joggers heading south towards the Park. It's nearly as bad as New York. Some of these gasping fatsos, these too-little-too-late artists, they look as though they're running up rising ground, climbing ground. My generation, we started all this. Before, everyone was presumably content to feel like death the whole time. Now they want to feel terrific for ever.” - Martin Amis

29. “I peer through the spectral, polluted, nicotine-sodden windows of my sock at these old lollopers in their kiddie gear. Go home, I say. Go home, lie down, and eat lots of potatoes. I had three handjobs yesterday. None was easy. Sometimes you really have to buckle down to it, as you do with all forms of exercise. It's simply a question of willpower. Anyone who's got the balls to stand there and tell me that a handjob isn't exercise just doesn't know what he's talking about. I almost had a heart-attack during number three. I take all kinds of other exercise too. I walk up and down the stairs. I climb into cabs and restaurant booths. I hike to the Butcher's Arms and the London Apprentice. I cough a lot. I throw up pretty frequently, which really takes it out of you. I sneeze, and hit the tub and the can. I get in and out of bed, often several times a day.” - Martin Amis

30. “Do you remember a little phenom called step aerobics? If you do, then you know how crazy it was to take two ninety-minute classes in a row. It’s incredible that I didn’t die from a blunt injury to the back of my head from slipping on my own pool of sweat.” - Kathy Griffin

31. “Exercise has a direct brain connection, when you consider what it actually does. What we tend to overlook are the feedback loops that connect the brain to every cell in the body. Therefore when you throw a ball, run on a treadmill, or jog along the shore, billions of cells are "seeing" the outside world. The chemicals transmitted form the brain are acting the way sense organs do, making contact with the outside world and offering stimulation from that world.This is why the jump from being sedentary to doing a minimal amount of exercise - such as walking, light gardening, and climbing the stairs instead of taking the elevator - is so healthy. Your cells want to be part of the world.” - Deepak Chopra

32. “Wearing that personal trainer nametag doesn't make you right #AHOLE” - Andy Ostrom