Gerard Manley Hopkins Quotes

101 Sourced Quotes

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
That is the great end of empires before God, to be Catholic and draw nations into their Catholicism. But our empire is less and less Christian as it grows.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Gerard Manley Hopkins
Towery city and branchy between towers;
Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
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 lightning to hear him sing.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
He is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should. So then, my brethren, live.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins
Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins
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, made for — things that give and mean to give God glory.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
On Saturday sailed from Bremen,
American-outward-bound,
Take settler and seamen, tell men with women,
Two hundred souls in the round.

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins
Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle!

Gerard Manley Hopkins
Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-fixed
Snowflake; that's fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing's life.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
How to keep—is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away?

Gerard Manley Hopkins
My own heart let me have 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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Gerard Manley Hopkins
I did say yes
O at lightning and lashed rod;
Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess
Thy terror, O Christ, O God.

Gerard Manley Hopkins