“The process of poetry consists firstly in maintaining this vision in its integrity and secondly in expressing this vision in words.”

The Usurpation Of Language (1910)
Context: Though science makes no use for poetry, poetry is enriched by science. Poetry “takes up” the scientific vision and re-expresses its truths, but always in forms which compel us to look beyond them to the total object which is telling its own story and standing in its own rights. In this the poet and the philosopher are one. Using language as the lever, they lift thought above the levels where words perplex and retard its flight, and leave it, at last, standing face to face with the object which reveals itself.

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.

"As I See It", in Forbes Vol. 158, no. 13 (2 December 1996), p. 48.

Source: Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time (1975), p. v

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

The Writing of Fiction (1925), ch. I

Summa Theologica (1265–1274), Unplaced by chapter

Vetulani, Jerzy (11 May 2012): Neurobiologia i religia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn559bvUzRE, lecture. Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (in Polish).

Diary, 29th August 1932.
Quotation posted with the permission of the National Scottish Library, Edinburgh, Scotland.