Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

On this day by God's grace I resolved to give up all beauty until I had His leave for it.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

What I do is me: for that I came.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

I say more, the just man justices; To the Father through the features of men's faces.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music, and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive, and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not...an obsolete one.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

— 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

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

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.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

— 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

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

— 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

A great work by an Englishman is like a great battle won by England. It is an unfading bay tree.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

I have desired to goAnd out of the swing of the sea.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Elected Silence, sing to meThe music that I care to hear.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb: Which only makes you eloquent.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Thou mastering meOver again I feel thy finger and find thee.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hope had grown grey hairs,Hope was twelve hours gone.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Abel is Cain's brother and breasts they have sucked the same.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.Crushed.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—The ear, it strikes like lightning to hear him sing.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-In his ecstasy!

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things—For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

All things counter, original, spare, strange;Praise him.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks ariseMeal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

"Hurrahing in Harvest", lines 5-6

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Ask of her, the mighty mother:Growth in everything.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

O if we but knew what we doAfter-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocriteAlarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Felix Randal the farrier, O he is dead then? my duty all ended,Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Poor Felix Randal;Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Ah! as the heart grows olderAnd yet you will weep and know why.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressedIt is Margaret you mourn for.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

What would the world be, once bereftLong live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

— 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 keepBack beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away?

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Wild air, world-mothering air,In every least thing’s life.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

I say that we are woundAs if with air.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

World-mothering air, air wild,Fold home, fast fold thy child.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

That night, that yearOf now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.This night!

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decreeAs I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Natural heart’s ivy, Patience masksOur ruins of wrecked past purpose.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

My own heart let me have more have pity on; letWith this tormented mind tormenting yet.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, andIs immortal diamond.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

The widow of an insight lost she lives, with aimI want the one rapture of an inspiration.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

The best ideal is the trueThe holy Three in One.

— 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

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

It is not only prayer that gives God glory but work. Smiting 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.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

— 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

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

What would the world be, once bereft

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

ELECTED Silence, sing to me

— Gerard Manley Hopkins