Gerard Manley Hopkins Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
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.

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.

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

I am soft sift 25 In an hourglass — at the wall Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift, And it crowds and it combs to the fall; I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane, But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall 30 Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s gift.

Moonless darkness stands between.
Past, the Past, no more be seen!
But the Bethlehem-star may lead me To the sight of Him Who freed me From the self that I have been.
Make me pure, Lord: Thou art holy;
Make me meek, Lord: Thou wert lowly;
Now beginning, and always:
Now begin, on Christmas day.

To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life.

...O if we but knew what to do
When we delve or hew — Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,