“What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what’s real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.”

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Context: The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

Source: Six Degrees of Separation

Prose Papers on Poetry Macmillan & Co 1910.
Prose Papers on Poetry (1910)

Source: An Object Of Beauty

Question, Léger once called you a realist. How do you feel about this?
1950s - 1960s, interview with Alexander Calder', (1962)

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 102
Context: Christianity has had to give up one piece after another of what it still imagined it possessed in the way of explanations of the universe. In this development it grows more and more into an expression of what constitutes its real nature. In a remarkable process of spiritualization it advances further and further from naive naiveté into the region of profound naiveté. The greater the number of explanations that slip from its hands, the more is the first of the Beatitudes, which may indeed be regarded as prophetic word concerning Christianity, fulfilled: "Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."

Source: Dead and Alive