Education must be aimed at creating a wider imagination in the child, not at suppressing. The child's mind must be set free.

Authors are ordinary people who usually start to live apart, in the imagination, because they don't fit in with normal, healthy people.

When the bees’ feet shake the bells of the heather, and the ruddy strings of the sap-stealing dodder are twined about the green spikes of the furze, it is summertime on the commons. Exmoor is the high country of the winds, which are to the falcons and the hawks: clothed by whortleberry bushes and lichens and ferns and mossed trees in the goyals, which are to the foxes, the badgers, and the red deer: served by rain-clouds and drained by rock-littered streams, which are to the otters.

Life is big business, fornication, and death. Civilisation is... the sterilising of truth... Civilisation is world-citizenship and freedom from tradition, based on rootless eternal wandering in the mind that had nothing to lose and everything to gain including the whole world.

Would the day come when scientists accepted that the ancients, who gave personalities to all natural phenomena, had divined the actual truth?

The whole of the Universe is run by God, which is one vast Imagination, struggling against the almost irresistible brute forces of the cosmos.

The fundamental love that a man needs in his life, if he is to have steady spiritual ease is the love of place where he was a child, and first became aware of the light, and the objects which the light illumined... It is the hurt child become man that seeks the wilderness, wherein to rebuild himself.

The slow rhythm of the body, the insistent rhythm of the wit, were they becoming irreconcilable in modern civilisation? The sedentary life, frustration and irritability; work with the body, fatigue – and peace of mind.

When the soil's fertility is being conserved instead of raped, when village life is a social unity, when pride of craftsmanship returns, when everyone works for the sake of adding beauty and importance to life, when every river is clean and bright, and the proud words 'I serve' are in everyone's heart and purpose. Then my country will be good enough for me.

The moose are gone, and their bones lie under the sand in the soft coal which was the forest by the estuary, thousands of years ago.