Paul Shepard Quotes

7 Sourced 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
Longer than memory we have known that each animal has its power and place, each a skill, virtue, wisdom, innocence — a special access to the structure and flow of the world. Each surpasses ourselves in some way. Together, sacred, they help hold the cosmos together, making it a joy and beauty to behold, but above all a challenge to understand as story, drama, and sacred play.

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

Paul Shepard
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
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
Animals are among the first inhabitants of the mind's eye. They are basic to the development of speech and thought. Because of their part in the growth of consciousness, they are inseparable from the series of events in each human life, indispensable to our becoming human in the fullest sense.

Paul Shepard
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