Quotes from Paul Shepard

There is a secret person undamaged in every individual.

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.

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

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.

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

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

To the desert go prophets and hermits; through desert 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.

Who would want to live in a world that is just not quite fatal?

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 desert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible.

How are we to become native to this land?" (as quoted in Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land by Amy Irvine)

Art should return to its roots, to cosmology, to rite, and to ceremony. The religious nature of art is its true meaning. Modern art's commitment to "emotion" and "feeling" or to abstract principles of design is, by Pleistocene standards, a sacrilegious act, just as narcotics belong not in a recreational but in a religious setting. In most small-scale societies there is regular dialogue on divinatory and dream experience that gets translated into art.

Our world does not make us; nor do we make ourselves; we are the continuing creation of the interaction between our organic structure and the way we shape the world around us. It's possible to do it badly. It's also possible to do it well. We are an epigenetic phenomenon: our development is elaborated continuously during our entire lifetimes as it has been down through the ages.