Man is a distance runner as a consequence of hundreds of thousands of years of chasing antelopes, horses, elephants, wild cattle, and deer.

The natural world is not only a set of constraints but of contexts within which we can more fully realize our dreams.

Men ran after and ate horses for four hundred thousand years. The outcome is more than a love of horse flesh; it is a runner's body.

There is a secret person undamaged in every individual.

To the desert go profits and hermits, through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.

All around us, aspects of the modern world - diet, exercise, medicine, art, work, family, philosophy, economics, ecology, psychology - have begun a long circle back toward their former coherence. Whether they can arrive before the natural world is damaged beyond repair and madness destroys humanity, we cannot tell.

Men are born human. What they must learn is to be an animal. If they learn otherwise it may kill them, and kill life on the planet.