“For those that endure until spring, existence is reduced to its elegant essentials.”

Your mind slides into a groove, and once it is in that groove, has difficulty noticing anything outside of it. During this time, my sense must be sharp; that is the main thing – to be sharp, yet open.

I already had a good start. As a teenager in rural Maine, after we came to America, I had learned hunting, fishing, and trapping in the wilderness.

My Maine mentors had long ago taught me to make home brew. I owned a rifle, and I’d already built a log cabin. The rest should be easy. I thought I’d give it a shot.

Trying to live in harmony with the dictates of nature is probably as inspirational as living in harmony with the Koran or the Bible. Perhaps it is also a timely undertaking.

Barry L. Jacobs and colleagues from the neuroscience program at Princeton University showed that when mice ran every day on an exercise wheel, they developed more brain cells and they learned faster than sedentary controls. I believe in mice.

Running is perhaps the most fundamental of all sports, and it is economically the least costly to perform.

Conditions are seldom ideal, and if one waits long enough for ideal conditions one is just making excuses.

The essential thing is to run period! And to do it for a long time and consistently and then everything will take care of itself.

I do not yet want to form a hypothesis to test, because as soon as you make a hypothesis, you become prejudiced.

We are social animals. We like to feel a part of something of beauty and power that transcends our insignificance. It can be a religion, a political party, a ball club. Why not also Nature? I feel a strong identity with the world of living things.

As a consequence, it is the most democratic and most competitive of all sports because individual merit can prevail despite economic equality. It is a sport for everyone, the whole world over.

Edward Abbey said you must brew your own beer; kick in you Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.

The very idea of “managing” a forest in the first place is oxymoronic, because a forest is an ecosystem that is by definition self-managing.

Spraying to kill trees and and raspberry bushes after a clear-cut merely looks unaesthetic for a short time, but tree plantations are deliberate ecodeath.

The family is the essential presence, the thing that never leaves you, even if you find you have to leave it.

We face an essential need to reach a definition of terrorism that will enjoy wide international agreement, thus enabling international operations against terrorist organizations.

History is various and sinuous and no essential part of the human spirit is ever wholly absent from it.

There is nothing more guaranteed to reduce a man to the essentials than to live beneath the sky.

The essential thing is to run period! And to do it for a long time and consistently and then everything will take care of itself.

To my mind the single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom.

I assure this committee that, if I am confirmed, I will be strictly independent of all political influences… essential to that institution’s ability to function effectively and achieve its mandated objectives.

An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one’s own prose.