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.

What are works of art for? to educate, to be standards. To produce is of little use unless what we produce is known, is widely known, the wider known the better, for it is by being known that it works, it influences, it does its duty, it does good. We must try, then, to be known, aim at it, take means to it. And this without puffing in the process or pride in the success.

The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree.
(from notes on 'Heraclitean Fire')

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.

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

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

Leave comfort root-room.

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!

He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;

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

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.

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.

The beauty we find is from the comparison we make of the things with themselves, seeing their likeness and difference

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.

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