Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
R. S. Thomas
55 quotes
“I turn now not to the Bible but to Wallace Stevens”
R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Blessings, Stevens; I stand with my back to grammar At an altar you never aspired to, celebrating the sacrament of the imagination whose high-priest notwithstanding you are.”
R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All art is anonymous.”
R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: R. S. Thomas : Priest and Poet, BBC TV (2 April 1972)
“I wouldn't say that I'm an orthodox Christian at all and the longer we live in the twentieth century the more fantastic discoveries are made, the more we hear what the universe is like I find it very difficult to be a kind of orthodox believer in Jesus as my saviour and that sort of thing. I'm more interested in the extraordinary nature of God. If there is God, if there is deity, then He, even as the old hymn says, He moves in a mysterious way and I'm fascinated by that mystery and I've tried to write out of that experience of God, the fantastic side of God, the quarrel between the conception of God as a person, as having a human side, and the conception of God as being so extraordinary. … So these are still things that occupy me, and every now and again, if you're lucky, you're able to make a poem out of this conception of God … so I suppose I'm trying to appeal to people to open their eyes and their minds to the extraordinary nature of God.”
R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) said by 2000 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen" in The David Jones Journal R. S. Thomas Special Issue (Summer/Autumn 2001)