Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes.

A dry, self-deprecating epigram, the line turns the modern virtue of exercise into a fleeting temptation best “cured” by rest. Hutchins—best known as an educator and public intellectual—often used wit to puncture pieties and expose how easily people rationalize comfort as principle. The humor depends on inversion: instead of acting on a healthy impulse, the speaker treats it like an illness that will subside if indulged with inactivity. Read more broadly, it satirizes procrastination and the human talent for making laziness sound like strategy, while also poking fun at moralizing self-improvement culture by refusing to take it solemnly.