Paul Shepard Quotes

• 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.

  Paul Shepard

  Animal, Men, Endurance

  17 Copy quote

• There is a secret person undamaged in every individual.

  Paul Shepard

  Secret, Individual, Persons

  Paul Shepard (2011). “Nature and Madness”, University of Georgia Press

  13 Copy quote

• 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.

  Paul Shepard

  Art, Philosophy, Exercise

  Paul Shepard (2013). “Coming Home to the Pleistocene”, p.170, Island Press

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• 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.

  Paul Shepard

  Spiritual, Reality, Leader

  18 Copy quote

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

  Paul Shepard

  Dream, World, Realizing

  Paul Shepard (2013). “Coming Home to the Pleistocene”, p.6, Island Press

  11 Copy quote

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

  Paul Shepard

  World, Want

  8 Copy quote

• Careless of waste, wallowing in refuse, exterminating the enemies . . . despising age, denying human natural history, fabricating pseudotraditions, swamped in the repeated personal crises of the aging preadolescent; all are familiar images of American society. They are signs of private nightmares of incoherence and disorder in broken climaxes where technologies in pursuit of mastery create ever-worsening problems - private nightmares expanded to a social level.

  Paul Shepard

  Technology, Broken, Historical

  12 Copy quote

• The human cardiovascular system evolved as part of the physiology of [prehistoric] hunters, who ran for their lives.

  Paul Shepard

  Endurance, Hunters, Humans

  10 Copy quote

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

  Paul Shepard

  Horse, Distance, Men

  Paul Shepard (2011). “The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game”, p.114, University of Georgia Press

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Paul Shepard

  Horse, Men, Years

  8 Copy quote

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

  Paul Shepard

  Running, Heart, Men

  Paul Shepard (1973). “The tender carnivore and the sacred game”

  8 Copy quote

• The desert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible.

  Paul Shepard

  Sky, Desert, Majestic

  Paul Shepard (2010). “Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature”, p.43, University of Georgia Press

  11 Copy quote

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