Gerard Manley Hopkins Quotes (81 quotes)

Works

Pied Beauty

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins: 81 quotes 5 likes

Famous Gerard Manley Hopkins Quotes

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins The Wreck of the Deutschland

"The Wreck of the Deutschland", line 160
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

“Hope had grown grey hairs,
Hope had mourning on,
Trenched with tears, carved with cares,
Hope was twelve hours gone.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins The Wreck of the Deutschland

"The Wreck of the Deutschland", lines 115-118
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

“Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" The Wreck of the Deutschland http://www.bartleby.com/122/4.html", lines 1-8
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
Context: Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World’s strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead;
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

“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

Journal (19 July 1872)
Letters, etc

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo: The Golden Echo, line 19
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins Quotes about the world

“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

" God's Grandeur http://www.bartleby.com/122/7.html", lines 1-4
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

“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

" Inversnaid http://www.bartleby.com/122/33.html, lines 13-16
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Complete Poems

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Journal (24 February 1873)
Letters, etc

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Sermon (23 November 1879)
Letters, etc

“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

Comments on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola

“World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe", lines 124-126
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Gerard Manley Hopkins Quotes about beauty

“Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" Hurrahing in Harvest http://www.bartleby.com/122/14.html", lines 1-4
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

“O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"Binsey Poplars", stanza 2
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

“Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" Spring http://www.bartleby.com/122/9.html", stanza 1
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
Context: 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.

“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 Pied Beauty

"Pied Beauty", lines 7-11
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue"
Letters, etc

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Journal entry (6 November 1865), as reported in In Extremity: A Study of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1978) by John Robinson, p. 1

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Trending quotes

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Heart

“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

Letter to Robert Bridges (14 August 1879)
Letters, etc

Age

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Letter to Robert Bridges (18 October 1882)
Letters, etc
Context: 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.

Heart

Gerard Manley Hopkins Quotes

“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.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" Pied Beauty http://www.bartleby.com/122/13.html", lines 1-3
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

God

“You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty: the uncertainty ceasing, interest ceases also…”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Letter to Robert Bridges (24 October 1883)
Letters, etc
Context: 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 have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.
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.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" Heaven-Haven http://www.bartleby.com/122/2.html", lines 1-8
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Spring

“I say more, the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Christ — 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.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame" (undated poem, c. March - April 1877)

Love , Men , God , Justice

“Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" The Starlight Night http://www.bartleby.com/122/8.html" (1877), lines 1-3
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
Context: Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Star

“Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"The Habit of Perfection", lines 5 - 8
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Love

“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.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"The Habit of Perfection", lines 1-4
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Music , Silence , Singing

“What I do is me: for that I came.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame" http://www.embodiment-of-freedom.com/persfree/hopkins.html (undated poem, c. March - April 1877) - Analysis and information regarding this poem at the Gerard Manley Hopkins Society http://www.gerardmanleyhopkins.org/lectures_2004/As_Kingfishers_analysis.html

“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

" Carrion Comfort http://www.bartleby.com/122/40.html", lines 1-4
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Hope , Cry , Despair

“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

The Principle or Foundation

God , Food

“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

Letter to Richard Watson Dixon (17 October 1881)
Letters, etc

Fashion

“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

The Principle or Foundation

God , Horse

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day http://www.bartleby.com/122/45.html", lines 1-3
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Feeling , Night

“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

" My own heart let me have more have pity on http://www.bartleby.com/122/47.html", lines 1-4
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Sadness , Heart

“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

Letter to Robert Bridges (15 February 1879)
Letters, etc

Hope , Music , Time , Painting

“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

Letter to his father, Manley Hopkins (16 October 1866)
Letters, etc

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Principle or Foundation

“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

Letter to A.W.M. Baillie (10 September 1864)
Letters, etc

Thinking

“My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" Binsey Poplars http://www.bartleby.com/122/19.html", lines 1-8
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Sun

“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

Comments on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"Carrion Comfort", lines 13-14
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

God , Night

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" In the Valley of the Elwy http://www.bartleby.com/122/16.html", lines 9-10
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Love , World , Water

“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

Letter to A.W.M. Baillie (22 May 1880)
Letters, etc

People , Religion , Reality

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Comments on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola

Search , Nature

“Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" Spring and Fall http://www.bartleby.com/122/31.html", lines 1-2
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Letter to Robert Bridges (1 September 1885)
Letters, etc

Time

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe", lines 34-36
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

“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

Letter to E.H. Coleridge (22 January 1866)
Letters, etc

Life , Thinking , Personality

“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

"Spring and Fall", lines 12-15
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Heart

“I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day", lines 9-14
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

God

“When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" Peace http://www.bartleby.com/122/22.html", lines 3-6
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Death , War , Peace , Heart

“The widow of an insight lost she lives, with aim
Now known and hand at work now never wrong.
Sweet fire the sire of muse, my soul needs this;
I want the one rapture of an inspiration.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" To R. B. http://www.bartleby.com/122/51.html", lines 7-10
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Soul

“The best ideal is the true
And other truth is none.
All glory be ascribed to
The holy Three in One.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" Summa http://www.bartleby.com/122/52.html", lines 1-4
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Truth

“Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?—
Growth in everything.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" The May Magnificat http://www.bartleby.com/122/18.html", stanza 4
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Spring , Question

“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

Letter to Coventry Patmore, published in The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges (1955), edited by C. C. Abbott, p. 263
Letters, etc

Nature

“"Hurrahing in Harvest", lines 5-6”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"God's Grandeur", lines 5-8
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Feeling

“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?”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend http://www.bartleby.com/122/50.html", lines 1-4
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Art , Disappointment , Way

“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

Comments on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola

“I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy!”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" The Windhover http://www.bartleby.com/122/12.html", lines 1-5
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

“Take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Letter to Robert Bridges (25 October 1879 )
Letters, etc

Reading

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Letter to A.W.M. Baillie (10 September 1864)
Letters, etc

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" No Worst, There Is None http://www.bartleby.com/122/41.html", lines 1-2
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

School , Past

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Letter to Robert Bridges (13 October 1886)
Letters, etc

Tree

“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

Comments on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola

“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

Letter to Coventry Patmore (4 June 1886)
Letters, etc

God , Drawing

“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

Sermon (23 November 1879)
Letters, etc

Secret , Beauty , Light , Christ

“Poor Felix Randal;
How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"Felix Randal", lines 11-14
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend", line 14
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Life

“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

Diary (April 1864)
Letters, etc

World , Time , Flying , Happiness

Similar authors

Emily Brontë 151

English novelist and poet

Percy Bysshe Shelley 246

English Romantic poet

Elizabeth Barrett Browning 88

English poet, author

Thomas Hardy 171

English novelist and poet

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 220

English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Robert Southey 51

British poet

Matthew Arnold 166

English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector…

George Gordon Byron 227

English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

William Blake 249

English Romantic poet and artist

Robert Browning 179

English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

Similar authors

Emily Brontë 151

English novelist and poet

Percy Bysshe Shelley 246

English Romantic poet

Elizabeth Barrett Browning 88

English poet, author

Thomas Hardy 171

English novelist and poet

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 220

English poet, literary critic and philosopher