Top 50 Gerard Manley Hopkins Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Your personal boundaries protect the inner core of your identity and your right to choices.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

2. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

3. “Glory be to God for dappled things.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

4. “What I do is me, for that I came.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

5. “Let Him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

6. “Life death all does end and each day dies with sleep.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

8. “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.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

9. “I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

11. “Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

12. “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

13. “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small Durance deal with that steep or deep...”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

14. “Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies! Oh look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

15. “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

16. “No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

17. “I say that we are wound With mercy round and round As if with air.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

18. “What is all this juice and all this joy?”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

19. “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 lightning to hear him sing.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

21. “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

22. “What you look at hard seems to look at you.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

23. “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

24. “The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

25. “Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

26. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out like shining from shook foil? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wearsman’ssmudgeand sharesman’ssmell: thesoil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

27. “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

28. “The Indian gods are imposing, the Greek gods are not. Indeed they are not brave, not self-controlled, they have no manners, they are not gentlemen and ladies.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

29. “The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

31. “I do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

32. “Crystal sincerity hath found no shelter but in a fool’s cap.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

33. “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

34. “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

35. “All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

36. “Horrible to say, in a manner I am a Communist.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

37. “All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we knew how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

38. “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

39. “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

40. “The male quality is the creative gift.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

41. “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

42. “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

43. “The Best ideal is the true and other truth is none. All glory be ascribed to the holy Three in One.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

45. “After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

46. “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

47. “It kills me to be time’s eunuch and never to beget.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

48. “I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

49. “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

50. “Even with one companion ecstasy is almost banished.”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins