Movement, Exercise, Mind-Body Movement Arts, Motion, Practice: Quotes, Notes, Sayings

Movement is a medicine for creating change in a person's physical, emotional, and mental states.
- Carol Welch

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as bird wings.
- Rumi

"The primary and most beautiful of nature's qualities is motion"
- Marquis De Sade

Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.
- Bruce Lee

In a dancer, there is reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength.
- Martha Graham

I'm passionately involved in life: I love its change, its color, its movement. To be alive, to be able to see, to walk, to have houses, music, paintings - it's all a miracle.
- Arthur Rubinstein

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action.
- D. H. Lawrence
[In Taijiquan we have movements called 'High Pat on Horse,' 'Parting the Wild Horse's Mane.']

It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.
- Alan Cohen

In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.
- Deepak Chopra

All things change, nothing is extinguished. There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all hings are brought into being with a changing nature; the ages themselves glide by in constant movement.
- Ovid

To me, if life boils down to one thing, it's movement. To live is to keep moving.
- Jerry Seinfeld

All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.
- Martha Graham

Words represent your intellect. The sound, gesture and movement represent your feelings.
- Patricia Fripp

A dancer must listen to his body and pay homage to it. Behind the movement lies this terrible, driving passion, this necessity. I won't settle for anything less.
- Martha Graham

Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.
- Aldos Huxley

The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.
- Blaise Pascal

Too much action with too little intent makes for wasteful exertion of energy and the confusion between movement and progress.
- Steve Maraboli

Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.
- Sarah Manguso

There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
- Carl Jung

Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want--you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don't know. I've forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn't matter, so long as you move.
- Ayn Rand

"Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.
- Martha Graham

We are all glorified motion sensors. Some things only become visible to us when they undergo change. We take for granted all the constant, fixed things, and eventually stop paying any attention to them. At the same time we observe and obsess over small, fast-moving, ephemeral things of little value. The trick to rediscovering constants is to stop and focus on the greater panorama around us. While everything else flits abut, the important things remain in place. Their stillness appears as reverse motion to our perspective, as relativity resets our motion sensors. It reboots us, allowing us once again to perceive. And now that we do see, suddenly we realize that those still things are not so motionless after all. They are simply gliding with slow individualistic grace against the backdrop of the immense universe. And it takes a more sensitive motion instrument to track this.
- Vera Nazarian

Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
- Lewis Caroll

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.
- Saul Alinsky

Heaven,
I’m in heaven
And my heart beats so that
I can hardly speak,
And I seem to find
The happiness I seek
When we’re out together dancing
Cheek to cheek.
- Irving Berlin

Behind the visible movement there is another movement, one which cannot be seen, which is very strong, on which the outer movement depends. If this inner movement were not so strong, the outer one would not have any action.
- Jeanne de Salzmann

We do not stop exercising because we grow old - we grow old because we stop exercising.
- Kenneth Cooper

To learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same.
- Martha Graham

Before you've practiced, the theory is useless. After you've practiced, the theory is obvious.
- David Williams

In truth, it matters less what we do in practice than how we do it and why we do it. The same posture, the same sequence, the same meditation with a different intention takes on an entirely new meaning and will have entirely different outcomes.
- Donna Farhi

The only thing for certain is that everything changes. The rate of change increases. If you want to hang on you better speed up. That is the message of today. It could however be useful to remind everyone that our basic needs never change. The need to be seen and appreciated! It is the need to belong. The need for nearness and care, and for a little love! This is given only through slowness in human relations. In order to master changes, we have to recover slowness, reflection and togetherness. There we will find real renewal.
- Guttorm Floistad

We don’t "really learn” Tai Chi by listening to, imitating, and following a live Tai chi instructor, or reading Tai Chi books, or watching Tai Chi instructional DVDs. The “learning” comes from practicing Tai Chi, playing Tai Chi, moving by Tai chi, and feeling Tai Chi. We move from being awkward and uncomfortable to moving gracefully, fluidly, easily, confidently, and beautifully. Live and virtual Tai Chi instructors provide us with information and ideas about what Tai Chi has been for others and could be for us, its rich history, and provide us with a model of how a "form" might look and be realized as expressed by their body-mind. Our instructor's "mind" set or intention is important - depending, for example, on whether they emphasize martial applications or they are a New Age energy arts dancer. Likewise, our own progress in "learning" will depend upon our own "mind set" of intentions, dedication, toughness, the courage to go beyond our limitations and failures, and our willpower. Learning Tai Chi is always a complex matrix of interactions, lived experiences, daily training, and accumulated muscle memories. Less thinking and more practice, training, and doing will result in the greatest learning. Repeated movements are the foundation for Tai Chi learning.
- Mike Garofalo, Learning Chen Taijiquan

Exercise and temperance can preserve something of our early strength even in old age.
- Cicero

Physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body, it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity.
- John F. Kennedy

Patients should have rest, food, fresh air, and exercise - the quadrangle of health.
- William Osler

You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.
– Charles Buxton

Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.
– Edward Stanley

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.
– Charles Caleb Colton

Just do it!
- Nike

Physical activity is an excellent stress-buster and provides other health benefits as well. It also can improve your mood and self image.
- Jon Wickham

What yoga philosophy and all the great Buddhist teachings tells us is that solidity is a creation of the ordinary mind and that there never was anything permanent to begin with that we could hold on to. Life would be much easier and substantially less painful if we lived with the knowledge of impermanence as the only constant.
- Donna Farhi

A lack of exercise robs the body of an essential ingredient.
- Karen Sessions

Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it.
- Plato

Don't let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
- John Wooden

Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.
- Vince Lombardi

Breathing correctly is the key to better fitness, muscle strength, stamina and athletic endurance.
- Michael Yessis

I can feel the wind go by when I run.
It feels good.
It feels fast.
- Evelyn Ashford

I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand!
Confucius

Action is this movement which is itself thought and emotion. This action is the relationship between the individual and society. It is conduct, work cooperation, which we call fulfillment. That is, when mind is functioning without seeking a culmination, a goal, and therefore thinking creatively, that thinking is action, which is the relationship between the individual and society. Now, if this movement of thought is clear, simple, direct, spontaneous, profound, then there is no conflict in the individual against society, for action then is the very expression of this living, creative movement.
- Krishnamurti

For me, yoga is not just a workout - it's about working on yourself.
- Mary Glover

Mountain pose teaches us, literally, how to stand on our own two feet.... teaching us to root ourselves into the earth.... Our bodies become a connection between heaven and earth.
- Carol Krucoff

Yoga is the perfect opportunity to be curious about who you are
- Jason Crandall

These days, my practice is teaching me to embrace imperfection: to have compassion for all the ways things haven't turned out as I planned, in my body and in my life - for the ways things keep falling apart, and failing, and breaking down. It's less about fixing things, and more about learning to be present for exactly what is.
- Anne Cushman

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.
- Carl Rogers

Body Movement: Coping with the Environment. By Irmgard Bartenieff with Dori Lewis.

Red Bluff, Tehama County, North Sacramento Valley, Northern Central California, U.S.A.
Cities in the area: Oroville, Paradise, Durham, Chico, Hamilton City, Orland, Willows, Corning,
Rancho Tehama, Los Molinos, Tehama, Proberta, Gerber, Manton, Cottonwood,
Anderson, Shasta Lake, Palo Cedro, and Redding, CA, California.

Movement
Mind-Body Movement Arts: Taijiquan, Qigong, Yoga, Walking, Dancing

Bibliography Links Resources Quotations

Research by
Michael P. Garofalo

Movement Mind-Body Movement Arts: Taijiquan, Qigong, Yoga, Walking, Dancing

Bibliography Links Resources Quotations

Research by Michael P. Garofalo

Movement
Mind-Body Movement Arts: Taijiquan, Qigong, Yoga, Walking, Dancing

Research by
Michael P. Garofalo