Gerard Manley Hopkins quotes

Gerard Manley Hopkins was an English poet and Jesuit priest, renowned for his innovative use of language and rhythm in poetry. His works, marked by vivid imagery and unique "sprung rhythm," gained recognition posthumously and influenced modern poetry. He is remembered as a groundbreaking figure in Victorian literature. Here are 86 of his quotes:

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

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

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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

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.

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

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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

For myself I make no secret, I look forward with eager desire to seeing the matchless beauty of Christ's body in the heavenly light.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night!

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

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

I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.

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

It kills me to be time's eunuch and never to beget.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I find myself both as man and as myself something more determined and distinctive, at pitch, more distinctive and higher pitched than anything else I see.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins