42 Inspiring Exercise Quotes

Finding the motivation to stay active can sometimes be challenging, but the right words can spark the drive you need to push forward. Whether you're a seasoned athlete looking for a boost, or just beginning your fitness journey, the wisdom and encouragement from inspiring quotes can be incredibly empowering. Here, we’ve curated a collection of the top 42 inspiring exercise quotes to provide the motivation and inspiration you need to conquer your fitness goals. Dive in and let these powerful words uplift your spirit and fuel your determination to stay active and healthy.

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

2. “If I liked food and disliked exercise as much as a 400 pound guy, I'd be a 400 pound guy.” - Scott Adams

3. “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

4. “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

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

6. “An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.” - Henry David Thoreau

7. “I believe that every human has a finite amount of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.” - Neil Armstrong

8. “I don't mind exercise but it's a private activity. Joggers should run in a wheel - like hamsters - because I don't want to look at them. And I really hate people who go on an airplane in jogging outfits. That's a major offense today, even bigger than Spandex bicycle pants. You see eighty-year-old women coming on the plane in jogging outfits for comfort. Well my comfort - my mental comfort - is completely ruined when I see them coming. You're on an airplane, not in your bedroom, so please! And I really hate walkathons: blocking traffic, people patting themselves on the back. The whole attitude offends me. They have this smug look on their faces as they hold you up in traffic so that they can give two cents to some charity.” - John Waters

9. “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

10. “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

11. “Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.” - Andrew Solomon

12. “My muscles informed me they did not want to go through any more exercise today. So I suggest that maybe he should let me off this time. He laughed, and I'm pretty sure it was at me...not with me. "Why is that funny?" "Oh," he said, his smile dropping. "You were serious.""Of course I was! Look, I've technically been awake for two days. Why do we have to start this training now? Let me go to bed." I whined. "It's just one hour.""How do you feel right now?""I hurt like hell.""You'll feel worse tomorrow.""So?""So, better get a jump on it while you still feel...not as bad.""What kind of logic is that?" I retorted.” - Richelle Mead

13. “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

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

15. “The traditional approach to an unknown risk is avoidance.” - James F. Clapp

16. “...in early pregnancy her ability to tolerate heat stress improves by about 30 percent and in late pregnancy by at least 70 percent. Indeed, when a woman exercises at 65 percent of her maximum capacity in late pregnancy, her peak core temperature during exercise does not even get up to the level it was at rest before she became pregnant.” - James F. Clapp

17. “[Recreational exercise] does not increase the incidence of either smaller than average babies or premature labor; and it actually may decrease the incidence of both.” - James F. Clapp

18. “This means that a woman who continues regular, sustained exercise until the onsent of labor usually delivers five to seven days earlier than a woman with an active lifestyle who does not exercise regularly. What an incentive to exercise!” - James F. Clapp

19. “If there had been an exercise I'd liked, would I have gotten this big in the first place?” - Jennifer Weiner

20. “The same ten minutes that magazines urge me to use for sit-ups and triceps dips, I used for sobbing.” - Tina Fey

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

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

23. “You only get one body; it is the temple of your soul. Even God is willing to dwell there. If you truly treat your body like a temple, it will serve you well for decades. If you abuse it you must be prepared for poor health and a lack of energy.” - Oli Hille

24. “Listening to the music while stretching her body close to its limit, she was able to attain a mysterious calm. She was simultaneously the torturer and the tortured, the forcer and the forced. This sense of inner-directed self-sufficiency was what she wanted most of all. It gave her deep solace.” - Haruki Murakami

25. “Get comfortable with being uncomfortable!” - Jillian Michaels

26. “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

27. “If you had weak eyes, they needed exercise to get strong. Glasses were like crutches. They prevented people with feeble eyes from seeing the world on their own.” - Jeannette Walls

28. “Thinking about working out burns 0 calories, 0 percentage of fat and accomplishes 0 goals!” - Gwen Ro

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

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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “There's nothing sweeter than sweat.” - Lindsey Leavitt

37. “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

38. “I believe that human beings are designed to be physically active and that not doing so creates energy imbalances within the body that ultimately contribute to obesity and other health problems. As evidence, over 500,000 people die each year from diseases linked to physical inactivity and obesity. Furthermore, rates of hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, type 2 diabetes, and certain forms of cancer have all tripled over the past 30 years corresponding to decreasing levels of daily physical activity and increasing rates of obesity.” - Dr. Nina Cherie Franklin

39. “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

40. “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

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

42. “The physical vanity of the diet-and-exercise obsessive is recast as the pursuit of a kind of ritual purity, hedged about with taboos and guilt trips and mysticized by yoga.” - Ross Douthat