This one is real. The line comes from Walt Disney’s own first-person message in the Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1965, whose full text is readable at the Internet Archive ↗. The original reads “opening up new doors” and is preceded by a sentence the popular version drops: “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long.”
“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths” Walt Disney, "The Disney Team: Production," Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1965. The popular short form drops the word "up." Verified by quotle.info · Verbatim: “Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious … and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the world of Walt Disney — Animator, film producer, co-founder of Walt Disney Productions. Theme: "We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The document it actually comes from
Source
Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1965
Section
“The Disney Team: Production” — Walt Disney’s first-person message
Dated
Fiscal year ended 2 October 1965; shareholder letter dated 15 December 1965, Burbank, California
Original wording
“opening up new doors” — the popular version drops the “up”
Recently someone pointed out that in the past ten years we have produced 52 feature length motion pictures, exactly twice the 26 features we made in our first three decades, since the day in 1923 when Roy and I went into business making cartoons… The success of Mary Poppins and our other films, the world-wide attraction of Disneyland Park, the impact of our color program on network television, and the popularity of our four shows at the New York World’s Fair — these things give us confidence that what we do continues to have strong appeal and acceptance by the public.
Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious … and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. We’re always exploring and experimenting. Right now, we are busy dreaming up ideas for our future motion picture productions, new stories for television, new adventures for Disneyland, and our biggest new adventure of all, “Disney World” in Florida.
Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1965 · The Disney Team: Production
The ellipsis before “and curiosity” is in the original report, not an editorial cut. The bracketed break in the first paragraph is ours.
The passage appears verbatim in the full text of the Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1965 ↗, in a first-person message that identifies its speaker in the opening line: “since the day in 1923 when Roy and I went into business making cartoons.”
The same report sets the sentence in display type a few pages later — “We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious… we’re always exploring and experimenting” — so the trimmed form was already circulating inside Disney in the 1965 document itself ↗.
Wikiquote ↗ lists the line among its sourced Walt Disney quotations and cites the ending credits of Meet the Robinsons (2007) — the route by which the sentence reached a mass audience.
Disney’s own D23 quotes archive ↗ carries a longer version that opens “There’s really no secret about our approach” and closes on Imagineering; in the 1965 report those sentences belong to a separate, later passage.
The work containing this line — the Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1965 — was published in 1965 by an identifiable corporate publisher, so we treat it as in copyright in the United States and quote only a short excerpt for commentary and verification. Walt Disney died in 1966; nothing about his death moves a 1965 corporate publication into the public domain.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Right man, edited words
The attribution holds — this is one of the rare Walt Disney quotes with a real paper trail. What has drifted is the wording, the setting, and where the sentence stops.
~
WordingThe popular one-sentence version trimmed
The circulating form reads “opening new doors.” The 1965 annual report ↗ reads “opening up new doors,” and puts an ellipsis before “and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
~
SettingMeet the Robinsons (2007) popularizer
Wikiquote ↗ records the line as quoted in the film’s ending credits, and that is where most people met it. The film is the transmitter, not the origin — the words predate it by more than four decades.
~
LengthThe version that starts at “We keep moving forward” truncated
In the report the thought opens with “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long,” and closes on Disney announcing “our biggest new adventure of all, ‘Disney World’ in Florida.” Cutting both ends turns a business plan into a fridge magnet.
✕
CompositeThe longer “we call it Imagineering” version assembled
Disney’s own D23 archive ↗ prints it as one continuous quotation beginning “There’s really no secret about our approach.” In the 1965 report those words sit several paragraphs later, in a different passage, and no Imagineering clause is attached to the curiosity sentence.
The line is not a greeting-card aphorism. It sits in a corporate annual report, in the paragraph where Walt Disney pivots from a victory lap to what came next. He had just listed the wins — Mary Poppins, Disneyland, the colour television programme, four Disney shows at the New York World’s Fair — and then cut himself off: “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long.”
What he moves forward to, in the very next sentence of the same paragraph, is “our biggest new adventure of all, ‘Disney World’ in Florida.” The report’s shareholder letter is dated 15 December 1965 — a year to the day before Walt Disney died, and five and a half years before the Florida park opened. The curiosity line is, in its original setting, a man telling his shareholders why he was about to spend their money on a swamp.
Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long.
How a shareholder report became a movie credit
Most people meet the sentence at the end of a film. Meet the Robinsons ↗, the Walt Disney Animation Studios feature released 30 March 2007, is built around the family motto “Keep Moving Forward,” and Wikiquote records ↗ the Disney passage as appearing in the film’s ending credits. That is the vector by which the sentence went from an accounting document to a tattoo font.
The report itself already treated the sentence as quotable: a few pages after the message, the 1965 report sets it in display type as “We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious… we’re always exploring and experimenting.” Even Disney’s own designers were already trimming it.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1901–1966 · Animator, film producer, co-founder of Walt Disney Productions
Walt Disney (born 5 December 1901, died 15 December 1966) built a cartoon shop he started with his brother Roy in 1923 into a studio that made Snow White, Mary Poppins and Disneyland. By the mid-1960s his title inside the company was Executive Producer-in-charge of all production, and he was steering WED Enterprises — the design outfit that became Walt Disney Imagineering. He is also one of the most heavily fake-quoted people on the internet, which makes the lines that are documented worth pinning down precisely.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Walt Disney, “The Disney Team: Production,” in Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1965 (Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Productions, 1965). Scanned copy and full text at the Internet Archive.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths’?” Last verified 7 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/we-keep-moving-forward-opening-new-doors-and-doing-new/