• Chiral invariance has been a strong guide in constructing the meson presence in nuclei. Whereas low-energy theorems have pinned down isovector exchange currents, by gauging the baryon density anomaly, a good description at both low and high momenta of the deuteron (isoscalar) magnetic form factor has been achieved. • At low energies, both the nucleon and plun can be divided into an interior quark core and exterior meson cloud. At high energies one sees the quarks in both regions. The quark core in strange baryons tends to be somewhat larger than in the nucleon because there is little pion cloud to compress it. From the anomalously large tensor coupling of the p-meson to the nucleon, the nucleon quark core is found to have a radius R ∼ 0.5 fm> • A case is made that nonperturbative QCD should be used for low-energy descriptions, although perturbative QCD may be applicable to systems with strangeness. • It is argued that the exclusion principle operating at the quark level does not have very large effects in low-energy nuclear physics. • Two-phase models, with a Wigner (perturbative) phase at short distances should be used to properly incorporate the asymptotic freedom property of QCD. • Through nonperturbative QCD, elegant and deep connections can be made between nuclear physics phenomena and the QCD anomalies.