Running & Being Quotes

“The distance runner is mysteriously reconciling the separations of body and mind, of pain and pleasure, of the conscious and the unconscious. He is repairing the rent, and healing the wound in his divided self. He has found a way to make the ordinary extraordinary; the commonplace unique; the everyday eternal.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“The runner need not break four minutes in the mile or four hours in the marathon. It is only necessary that he runs and runs and sometimes suffers. Then one day he will wake up and discover that somewhere along the way he has begun to see order and law and love and Truth that makes men free. It”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“courage is the bridge between our minds and our bodies.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“From the moment you become a spectator, everything is downhill. It is a life that ends before the cheering and the shouting die.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“I am an intellectual. This does not mean I am intelligent, but that ideas are more important to me than people.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Man is meant to be a success.” Each of us, he said, is unique and endowed with potentials unlike those of others. Success comes in finding your authentic self, the person you truly are, and becoming that person, tapping all of that untapped potential.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“If you don’t have a challenge, find one,”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“He runs because he has to. Because in being a runner, in moving through pain and fatigue and suffering, in imposing stress upon stress, in eliminating all but the necessities of life, he is fulfilling himself and becoming the person he is.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Thomas Merton, another solitary, understood that. The beginning of freedom, he wrote, is not liberation from the body but liberation from the mind. We are not entangled in our own body, we are entangled in our mind. I”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Running keeps me at a physical peak and sharpens my senses. It makes me touch and see and hear as if for the first time. Through it I get through the first barrier to true emotions, the lack of integration with the body. Into it I escape from the pettiness and triviality of everyday life. And, once inside,stop the daily pendulum perpetually oscillating between distraction and boredom...It is the swing from boredom to anxiety, from depression to worry, that exhausts and defeats us. The sure knowledge that we can be much more than we are frustrates us.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“William James, who believed the decisive thing about us was not intelligence, strength, or wealth. “The real question posed to us is the effort we are willing to make,”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Disease, then, is one of those bad experiences that turns information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. The bad experiences that make you love yourself and your body and the world. And make you know that you are in a game that has to have a happy ending.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“The first half hour of my run is for my body. The last half hour, for my soul. In the beginning the road is a miracle of solitude and escape. In the end it is a miracle of discovery and joy. Throughout, it brings an understanding of what Blake meant when he said, “Energy is eternal delight.” I”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Courage, then, has nothing to do with a single act of bravery. Courage is how one lives, not one specific incident. Just as mortal sin is a lifestyle, not one startling transgression. Some,”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“The trouble with this country,” the late John Berryman once told fellow poet James Dickey, “is that a man can live his entire life without knowing whether or not he is a coward.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Anyone with a sense of humor can see that life is a joke, not a tragedy.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Guilt is the unlived life.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Sin is the failure to reach your potential,” he wrote. “Guilt is the unlived life.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“difficulté d’être.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Credo quia absurdum,”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“If you think that life has passed you by, or, even worse, that you are living someone else’s life, you can still prove the experts wrong. T”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Becoming an ex-alcoholic, however, is not easy. Drink may be futile and ultimately degrading, but only the fortunate drinker discovers this. And it is the even more fortunate one who then comes upon a new and healthy path to the summit of his physical and mental powers. Before the liver goes, the heart enlarges and the brain begins to deteriorate, he must get the message that there is a better way to experience himself and the universe. My”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“The distance runner who accepts the past in the person he is, and sees the future as a promise rather than a threat, is completely and utterly in the present. He is absorbed in his encounter with the everyday world. He is mysteriously reconciling the separations of body and mind, of pain and pleasure, of the conscious and the unconsciou. He is repairing the rent, and healing the wound in the divided self. He has found a way to make the ordinary extraordinary; the commonplace, unique; the everyday, eternal.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“with potentials unlike those of others. Success comes in finding your authentic self, the person you truly are, and becoming that person, tapping all of that untapped potential.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“The dash is pure body; the marathon is pure mind. The mile is body, mind and spirit. “The mile remains the classic distance,” wrote Paul Gallico, “because it calls for brains and rare judgment as well as speed, condition and courage.” And its searching third quarter requires the leap of faith that what you are doing is worth the effort.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“No”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“One thing we runners know. There is no substitute for running. No matter what age we are. No matter what time we do it.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“The real loneliness begins with my failures as son, husband, father, physician, lover, friend.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“When you race you are under oath. You are testifying as to who you are.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Today’s work does not make us the persons we can be. Work is simply the price to be paid. Having earned our daily bread, we can turn to our daily play.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience