Gerard Manley Hopkins Quotes

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 wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

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.

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

My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell,
Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast...

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.

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

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

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

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

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

"
Pied Beauty —
"

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;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

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.

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

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.

It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.