“Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor… the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.”

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

(VIII.4) Del Rey, p. 284
Blade of Tyshalle (2001)
Variant: Maybe. A powerful. Enough. Metaphor. Grows. Its own. Truth.

Source: The Common Reader

The Vampire Lestat (1985)

Paraphrased variant: We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
Harvard address (2008)

R. S. Thomas : Priest and Poet, BBC TV (2 April 1972)
Context: Any form of orthodoxy is just not part of a poet's province … A poet must be able to claim … freedom to follow the vision of poetry, the imaginative vision of poetry … And in any case, poetry is religion, religion is poetry. The message of the New Testament is poetry. Christ was a poet, the New Testament is metaphor, the Resurrection is a metaphor; and I feel perfectly within my rights in approaching my whole vocation as priest and preacher as one who is to present poetry; and when I preach poetry I am preaching Christianity, and when one discusses Christianity one is discussing poetry in its imaginative aspects. … My work as a poet has to deal with the presentation of imaginative truth.

" A Defense of Slang http://books.google.com/books?id=8WpaAAAAMAAJ&q="all+slang+is+metaphor+and+all+metaphor+is+poetry"&pg=PA110#v=onepage"
The Defendant (1901)