Gerard Manley Hopkins Quotes
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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!
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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.
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I do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you.
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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.
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Beauty is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison.
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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.
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As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame
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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.
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What is all this juice and all this joy?
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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.
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I say that we are wound With mercy round and round As if with air.
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Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.
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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.
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When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
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The Best ideal is the true and other truth is none. All glory be ascribed to the holy Three in One.
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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.
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The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened.
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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.
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Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson.
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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.
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O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small Durance deal with that steep or deep.
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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.
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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.
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Horrible to say, in a manner I am a Communist.