Inspirational Quotes Inspiration will get you to take those first steps on your journey. Craig Constantine

Open Preface

It is often said that although inspiration will get you out the door, it won't keep you going for the long haul. That's true.

Also true is the old adage:

If there's somewhere you need to be, start walking.

This little book is all about that one word, "start."

Print it, bookmark it, …whatever it takes. I hope it inspires you to start.

This little book is based upon my enormous, personal collection of quotes. I periodically mine my collection and add pages here for those quotes which are inspiring in the context of helping each of us to start moving.

To learn more about the Movers Mindset project, see https://moversmindset.com/

~ Craig Constantine

Open Play More

Play more. I feel like people are so serious, and it doesn’t take much for people to drop back into the wisdom of a childlike playfulness. If I had to prescribe two things to improve health and happiness in the world, it’d be movement and play. Because you can’t really play without moving, so they’re intertwined.

~ Jason Nemer

Open The Real Fear

These are serious fears. But they’re not the real fear. Not the Master Fear, the Mother of all Fears that’s so close to us that even when we verbalize it we don’t believe it. Fear That We Will Succeed. That we can access the powers we secretly know we possess. That we can become the person we sense in our hearts we truly are.

~ Steven Pressfield

Open Luxury

Modern luxury is the ability to think clearly, sleep deeply, move slowly, and live quietly in a world designed to prevent all four.

~ Justin Welsh

Open One's Own Voice

The fact is one’s own voice is not heard anywhere else. It’s a challenge to be yourself. It makes a lot of courage.

~ Yusef Lateef

Open First Priority

Make your own recovery the first priority in your life.

~ Robin Norwood

Open Pursue Your Dreams

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Open The Play Instinct

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

~ Carl Jung

Open Conduct of Life

Silence is the absolute poise or balance of body, mind, and spirit. The man who preserves his selfhood ever calm and unshaken by the storms of existence—not a leaf, as it were, astir on the tree; Not a ripple upon the surface of shining pool—his, in the mind of the unlettered sage, is the ideal attitude and conduct of life.

~ Charles Eastman

Open Excellence

What I understand today is that when the Stoics said that there was an opportunity in every obstacle, what they meant was the opportunity to practice virtue. To be a good person despite the bad things that have happened. To do good in the world despite the bad that has befallen you. They were speaking of the idea of arete. Excellence—in all forms.

~ Ryan Holiday

Open Somewhat Higher

The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.

~ Thomas Henry Huxley

Open Obstacles

We are kept from our goal, not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.

~ Robert Brault

Open The Best You Can

Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.

~ Maya Angelou

Open Open to

It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.

~ Richard Cavett

Open Peculiar Thinking

Every man has some peculiar train of thought which he falls back upon when he is alone. This, to a great degree, molds the man.

~ Dugald Stewart

Open Risk

I do not intend to take dangerous chances, both because I have no wish to get hurt and because a fall would stop my experimenting, which I would not like at all. The man who wishes to keep at the problem long enough to really learn anything positively must not take dangerous risks.

~ Wilbur Wright

Open Everyone Else

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

~ Haruki Murakami

Open A Good Story

The best arguments in the world won't change a single person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

~ Richard Powers

Open Wisdom

My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions.

~ Naval Ravikant

Open Improvement

People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing—refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Open Lists

To-do lists tend to be long; Success lists are short. One pulls you in all directions; The other aims you in a specific direction. One is a disorganized directory and the other is an organized directive. If a list isn't built around success, then that's not where it takes you. If your to-do list contains everything, then it's probably taking you everywhere but where you really want to go.

~ Gary Keller

Open Stick

Be like a postage stamp—stick to one thing until you get there.

~ Josh Billings

Open Room

Giving yourself the time and sapce to think and feel is crucial to your existence. Personhood requires encapsulation. You have to find a way to be yourself before you can share yourself.

~ Jaron Lanier

Open Defiance and Acceptance

Defiance and acceptance come together well in the following principle: There is always a countermove, always an escape or a way through, so there is no reason to get worked up. No one said it would be easy and, of course, the stakes are high, but the path is there for those ready to take it. This is what we’ve got to do. And we know that it’s going to be tough, maybe even scary.

~ Ryan Holiday

Open Reset

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

~ Anne Lamott

Open Success

This week I’ve been reading a lot and doing little work. That’s the way things ought to be. That’s surely the road to success.

~ Anne Frank

Open One

One day at a time. It sounds so simple. It actually is simple but it isn’t easy: It requires incredible support and fastidious structuring.

~ Russell Brand

Open Activity

Only staying active will make you want to live a hundred years.

~ Japanese proverb

Open Change

The most reliable way to change your entire life is by not changing your entire life… Improve the whole by mastering one thing.

~ James Clear

Open Priority

The root of the word ‘priority’ is singular… It was a singular word—the one thing. In modern times, we’ve turned it into ‘priorities,’ but then all of a sudden it turns into eight, ten, 15 things and that defeats the purpose.

~ Shaka Smart

Open Education

What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first step to something better.

~ Wendell Phillips

Open Pressure

To achieve great things, two things are needed: A plan and not quite enough time.

~ Leonard Bernstein

Open Disguise

We become so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that at last we are disguised to ourselves.

~ Rochefoucauld

Open Purpose

To concentrate your mind on something is not the true purpose of zen. The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes.

~ Shunryu Suzuki

Open Memory

Sometimes you don’t know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.

~ Gunnar Freyr

Open Chance

In the blink of an eye, something happens by chance—when you least expect it—sets you on a course that you never planned, into a future you never imagined.

~ Nicholas Sparks

Open Inevitable

There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.

~ Lowell

Open Life

Pick an arbitrary, stupid goal, become totally involved in it, and pursue it with vigor, and what happens to you in that pursuit is your life.

~ Kenny Shopsin

Open Work

No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.

~ Carl Jung

Open Questions

The only question that really matters, the only question whose correct answer can exert a civilizing influence on the future specialist, is the question asked by Buddha and Jesus, by Lao-Tsu and Socrates, by Job and Aeschylus, and Chaucer and Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, by every philosopher, every mystic, every great artist: Who am I and what, if anything, can I do about it?

~ Aldous Huxley

Open Hardship

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

~ Alain de Botton

Open Perfection

Perfectionism is not as much the desire for excellence, as it is the fear of failure couched in procrastination.

~ Dan Miller

Open Feelings

Let everything happen to you: Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Open Learn Something

No day in which you learn something is a complete loss.

~ David Eddings

Open Play

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.

~ Fred Rogers

Open Decline

Just as I have my own role to play, so does time. And time does its job much more faithfully, much more accurately, than I ever do. Ever since time began (when was that, I wonder?), it’s been moving ever forward without a moment’s rest. And one of the privileges given to those who’ve avoided dying young is the blessed right to grow old. The honor of physical decline is waiting, and you have to get used to that reality.

~ Haruki Murakami