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.

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

When men do not run they are likely to die prematurely from dysfunction of the heart and vascular systems or from disabling chronic disease.

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

There is a secret person undamaged in every individual.

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.

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.