George Sheehan > Quotes

“It's very hard in the beginning to understand that the whole idea is not
to beat the other runners. Eventually you learn that the competition is
against the little voice inside you that wants you to quit.”
― George Sheehan

“Success means having the courage, the determination, and the will to become the person you believe you were meant to be.”
― George Sheehan

“There are those of us who are always about to live. We are waiting until things change, until there is more time, until we are less tired, until we get a promotion, until we settle down / until, until, until. It always seems as if there is some major event that must occur in our lives before we begin living.”
― George sheehan/nora sheeh

“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 true runner is a very fortunate person. He has found something in him that is just perfect.”
― George Sheehan

“The mind's first step to self-awareness must be through the body.”
― George Sheehan

“For every runner who tours the world running marathons, there are thousands who run to hear the leaves and listen to the rain, and look to the day when it is suddenly as easy as a bird in flight.”
― George Sheehan

“Boredom, like beauty, is in the mind of the beholder. ’There is no such thing as an uninteresting subject,’ said Chesterton. ’The only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”
― George Sheehan

“I am a lonely figure when I run the roads. People wonder how far I have come, how far I have to go. They see me alone and friendless on a journey that has no visible beginning or end. I appear isolated and vulnerable, a homeless creature. It is all they can do to keep from stopping the car and asking if they can take me wherever I'm going.
I know this because I feel it myself. When I see the runner I have much the same thoughts. No matter how often I run the roads myself, I am struck by how solitary my fellow runner appears. The sight of a runner at dusk or in inclement weather makes me glad to be safe and warm in my car and headed for home. And at those times, I wonder how I can go out there myself, how I can leave the comfort and warmth and that feeling of intimacy and belonging, to do this distracted thing.
But when finally I am there, I realise it is not comfort and warmth I am leaving, not intimacy and belonging I am giving up, but the loneliness that pursues me this day and every day. I know that the real loneliness, the real isolation, the real vulnerability, begins long before I put on my running shoes.”
― George Sheehan

“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

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

“Running is just such a monestary-- a retreat, a place to commune with God and yourself, a place for psychological and spiritual renewal.”
― George Sheehan, George Sheehan on Running to Win: How to Achieve the Physical, Mental and Spiritual Victories of Running

“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

“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

“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

“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

“We may think there is willpower involved, but more likely...change is due to want power. Wanting the new addiction more than the old one. Wanting the new me in preference to the person I am now.”
― George Sheehan

“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 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

“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 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

“UNTIL I TOOK UP distance running, I found it easy to take it easy. I had no difficulty following the warnings of the experts. “Avoid stress,” cautioned the physicians. I did. “Reduce your tensions,” advised the psychologists. I did. “Rest that restless heart,” counseled the clergy. I did. Doing these things requires no effort when you are lacking what Santayana called America’s ruling passion—a love for business—when you are a lifelong non-joiner whose greatest desire is not to become involved, when almost everyone you meet is less interesting than your own ideas, and when your inner life has more reality than your outer one.”
― George Sheehan, The Essential Sheehan: A Lifetime of Running Wisdom from the Legendary Dr. George Sheehan

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

“Credo quia absurdum,”
― 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

“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