Gerard Manley Hopkins Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night!
-
What I do is me, for that I came.
-
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.
-
What is all this juice and all this joy?
-
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.
-
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.
-
Beauty is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you.
-
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.
-
The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened.
-
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 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.
-
Our Lord Jesus Christ , my brethren, is our hero, a hero all the world wants.
-
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame
-
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.
-
When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
-
The Best ideal is the true and other truth is none. All glory be ascribed to the holy Three in One.
-
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.
-
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.