Quotes from Gerard Manley Hopkins

Leave comfort root-room.

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

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

The child is father to the man.' How can he be? The words are wild. Suck any sense from that who can: 'The child is father to the man.' No; what the poet did write ran, 'The man is father to the child.' 'The child is father to the man!' How can he be? The words are wild!

The beauty we find is from the comparison we make of the things with themselves, seeing their likeness and difference

Into the snows she sweeps, Hurling the haven behind, The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps, For the infinite air is unkind, And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow, Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind; Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivelled snow Spins to the wido-making unchilding unfathering deeps. (from "The Wreck of the Deutschland, Part the Second")

"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."

Birds buildbut not I build; no, but strain, Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine,O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

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

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.

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

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.

When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

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

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.

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.