Best Manley Hopkins Quotes & Sayings

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet, Long live the weeds and the wildness yet. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

It kills me to be time's eunuch and never to beget. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

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. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

Natural heart's ivy, Patience masks Our ruins of wrecked past purpose. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

The achieve of; the mastery of the thing! — Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Best ideal is the true and other truth is none. All glory be ascribed to the holy Three in One. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring-
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
(From "Spring") — Gerard Manley Hopkins

This creative tension between wonderful and terrible is named so well by Gerard Manley Hopkins, as only poets can. Even the long title of his poem reveals his acceptance of the ever-changing flow of Heraclites and also his trust in the final outcome: "That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection." Flesh fade, and mortal trash fall to the residuary worm; world's wildfire, leave but ash: In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, — Richard Rohr

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.-Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

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. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

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. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

What you look at hard seems to look at you. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

It is the blight man was born for. It is Margaret you mourn for. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

Why wouldst thou rude on me they wring-world right foot rock? — Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

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. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

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. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

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. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

I say that we are wound With mercy round and round As if with air. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

The male quality is the creative gift. — 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. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

It is not only prayer that gives God glory but work. Smitting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God some glory if being in his grace you do it as your duty. To go to communion worthily gives God great glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a sloppail, give him glory too. He is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the Stooks arise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behavior Of silk-sack clouds! Has wilder, willful-waiver Meal-drift molded ever and melted across skies? — Gerard Manley Hopkins

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. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

Beauty is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

I am surprised you shd. say fancy and aesthetic tastes have led me to my present state of mind: these wd. be better satisfied in the Church of England, for bad taste is always meeting one in the accessories of Catholicism. — Gerard Manley Hopkins