Gerard Manley Hopkins Quotations

By the by, if the English race had done nothing else, yet if they left the world the notion of a gentleman, they would have done a great service to mankind.

I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living.

Beauty is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison.

Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson.

Nothing is so beautiful as spring- When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling. What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden.-Have, get, before it cloy...

Religion, you know, enters very deep; in reality it is the deepest impression I have in speaking to people, that they are or that they are not of my religion.

The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise.

It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.

The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened.

And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

But . . . I may as well say what I should not otherwise have said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession.

I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it.

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the Stooks arise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behavior Of silk-sack clouds! Has wilder, willful-waiver Meal-drift molded ever and melted across skies?

What is all this juice and all this joy?

I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.

All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose.

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

I can scarcely fancy myself to ask a superior to publish a volume of my verse and I own that humanly there is very little likelihood of that ever coming to pass. And to be sure if I chose to look at things on one side and not the other I could of course regret this bitterly. But there is more peace and it isthe holier lot to be unknown than to be known.

For I think it is the case with genius that it is not when quiescent so very much above mediocrity as the difference between the two might lead us to think, but that it has the power and privilege of rising from that level to a height utterly far from mediocrity: in other words that its greatness is that it can be so great.

The male quality is the creative gift.

I think that the trivialness of life is, and personally to each one, ought to be seen to be, done away with by the Incarnation.

Our Lord Jesus Christ , my brethren, is our hero, a hero all the world wants.

I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.

What are works of art for? to educate, to be standards. To produce is of little use unless what we produce is known, is widely known, the wider known the better, for it is by being known that it works, it influences, it does its duty, it does good. We must try, then, to be known, aim at it, take means to it. And this without puffing in the process or pride in the success.

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we knew how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him.

I awoke in the Midsummer not-to-call night, in the white and the walk of the morning

The Indian gods are imposing, the Greek gods are not. Indeed they are not brave, not self-controlled, they have no manners, they are not gentlemen and ladies.

Spring and Fall: To a Young Child Márgarét, are you gríeving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leáves, líke the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? Ah! ás the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you wíll weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sórrow's spríngs áre the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It ís the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.

Time has three dimensions and one positive pitch or direction. It is therefore not so much like any river or any sea as like the Sea of Galilee, which has the Jordan running through it and giving a current to the whole.

Birds buildbut not I build; no, but strain, Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine,O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

Ask of Her, the mighty Mother. Her reply puts this other Question: What is Spring?- Growth in every thing - Flesh and fleece, fur and feather, Grass and green world all together, Star-eyed strawberry breasted Throstle above Her nested Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin Forms and warms the life within, And bird and blossom swell In sod or sheath or shell.

What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden.-Have, get, before it cloy, Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning, Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy, Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.

And the headbonny ash that sits over the burn. What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O Let them be left, wildness and wet: Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Life death all does end and each day dies with sleep.

What you look at hard seems to look at you.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night!

For myself I make no secret, I look forward with eager desire to seeing the matchless beauty of Christ's body in the heavenly light.

Horrible to say, in a manner I am a Communist.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame

Natural heart's ivy, Patience masks Our ruins of wrecked past purpose.

I do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you.

That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again.

For human nature, being more highly pitched, selved, and distinctive than anything in the world, can have been developed, evolved,condensed, from the vastness of the world not anyhow or by the working of common powers but only by one of finer or higher pitch and determination than itself.

I am surprised you shd. say fancy and aesthetic tastes have led me to my present state of mind: these wd. be better satisfied in the Church of England, for bad taste is always meeting one in the accessories of Catholicism.

When I compare myself, my being-myself, with anything else whatever, all things alike, all in the same degree, rebuff me with blank unlikeness.

When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

Even with one companion ecstasy is almost banished.

Any day, any minute we bless God for our being or for anything, for food, for sunlight, we do and are what we were meant for, madefor--things that give and mean to give God glory.

You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty: the uncertainty ceasing interest ceases also.... But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty: without certainty, without formulation there is no interest;... the clearer the formulation the greater the interest.

I find myself both as man and as myself something more determined and distinctive, at pitch, more distinctive and higher pitched than anything else I see.

Searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being.

And I have asked to be Where no storms come, Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, And out of the swing of the sea.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.

It seems then that it is not the excellence of any two things (or more) in themselves, but those two things as viewed by the light of each other, that makes beauty.

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must Disappointment all I endeavour end?

God?is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should.

It kills me to be time's eunuch and never to beget.

Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales, All the air things wear that build this world of Wales.

I consider my selfbeing ... that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man.

Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum ) and can never recur. That nothing shd. be old or borrowed however cannot be.

My own heart let me more have pity on; let Me live to my sad self hereafter kind, Charitable; not live this tormented mind With this tormented mind tormenting yet.

Crystal sincerity hath found no shelter but in a fool's cap.

I say that we are wound With mercy round and round As if with air.

We have him [God] before our eyes, masked in the sacred Host

What I do is me, for that I came.

Glory be to God for dappled things- For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings; Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

I have desired to go Where springs not fail, To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail And a few lilies blow.

It is not only prayer that gives God glory but work. Smitting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God some glory if being in his grace you do it as your duty. To go to communion worthily gives God great glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a sloppail, give him glory too. He is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should.

Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies! Oh look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Glory be to God for dappled things.

The Best ideal is the true and other truth is none. All glory be ascribed to the holy Three in One.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out like shining from shook foil? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wearsman'ssmudgeand sharesman'ssmell: thesoil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

Let Him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.

ELECTED Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear.

For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give Him glory, too. God is so great that all things give Him glory if you mean that they should.

Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

Your personal boundaries protect the inner core of your identity and your right to choices.

Nothing is so beautiful as spring- When weeds in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;...