Leigh Hunt Quotes

Colors are the smiles of nature.

Anglers boast of the innocence of their pastime; yet it puts fellow-creatures to the torture. They pique themselves on their meditative faculties; and yet their only excuse is a want of thought.

An author is like a baker; it is for him to make the sweets, and others to buy and enjoy them.

The very greatest genius, after all, is not the greatest thing in the world, any more than the greatest city in the world is the country or the sky. It is the concentration of some of its greatest powers, but it is not the greatest diffusion of its might. It is not the habit of its success, the stability of its sereneness.

The beautiful attracts the beautiful.

If you are ever at a loss to support a flagging conversation, introduce the subject of eating.

Traveling in the company of those we love is home in motion.

It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands, Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream, And times and things, as in that vision, seem Keeping along it their eternal stands.

Tears and sorrows and losses are a part of what must be experienced in this present state of life: some for our manifest good, and ail, therefore, it is trusted, for our good concealed;--for our final and greatest good.

"Books ... books, ..." he exclaims. It is those that teach us to refine on our pleasures when young, and which, having so taught us, enable us to recall them with satisfaction when old.

Affection, like melancholy, magnifies trifles; but the magnifying of the one is like looking through a telescope at heavenly objects; that of the other, like enlarging monsters with a microscope.

Hair is the most delicate and lasting of our materials, and survives us, like love. It is so light, so gentle; so escaping from the idea of death, that, with a lock of hair belonging to a child or friend, we may almost look up to heaven and compare notes with the angelic nature,--may almost say, "I have a piece of thee here not unworthy of thy being now.

Stolen kisses are always sweetest.

Write me as one who loves his fellow men.

Beauty too often sacrifices to fashion.

Words are often things also, and very precious, especially on the gravest occasions. Without "words," and the truth of things that is in them, what were we?

There seems a life in hair, though it be dead.

The most fascinating women are those that can most enrich the every day moments of existence. In a particular and attaching sense, they are those that can partake our pleasures and our pains in the liveliest and most devoted manner. Beauty is little without this; with it she is triumphant.

The only place a new hat can be carried into with safety is a church, for there is plenty of room there.

The rapturuous, wild, and ineffable pleasure of drinking at somebody else's expense

A dog can have a friend; he has affections and character, he can enjoy equally the field and the fireside; he dreams, he caresses, he propitiates; he offends, and is pardoned; he stands by you in adversity; he is a good fellow.

I loved my friend for his gentleness, his candor, his good repute, his freedom even from my own livelier manner, his calm and reasonable kindness. It was not any particular talent that attracted me to him, or i anything striking whatsoever. I should say in one word, it was his goodness.

Many birds and beasts are...as fit to go to Heaven as many human beings - people who talk of their seats there with as much confidence as if they had booked them at a box office.

Bread, milk and butter are of venerable antiquity. They taste of the morning of the world.

When moral courage feels that it is in the right, there is no personal daring of which it is incapable.

The drama is not a mere copy of nature, not a facsimile. It is the free running hand of genius, under the impression of its liveliest wit or most passionate impulses, a thousand times adorning or feeling all as it goes; and you must read it, as the healthy instinct of audiences almost always does, if the critics will let them alone, with a grain of allowance, and a tendency to go away with as much of it for use as is necessary, and the rest for the luxury of laughter, pity, or poetical admiration.

Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair.

Stolen sweets are always sweeter, Stolen kisses much completer, Stolen looks are nice in chapels, Stolen, stolen be your apples.

Happy opinions are the wine of the heart.

Affection, like melancholy, magnifies trifles.

Those who have lost an infant are never, as it were, without an infant child. Their other children grow up to manhood and womanhood, and suffer all the changes of mortality; but this one alone is rendered an immortal child; for death has arrested it with his kindly harshness, and blessed it into an eternal image of youth and innocence.

Some tears belong to us because we are unfortunate; others, because we are humane; many, because we are mortal. But most are caused by our being unwise. It is these last only that of necessity produce more.

With spots of sunny openings, and with nooks To lie and read in, sloping into brooks.

A large bare forehead gives a woman a masculine and defying look. The word "effrontery" comes from it. The hair should be brought over such a forehead as vines are trailed over a wall.

The golden line is drawn between winter and summer. Behind all is blackness and darkness and dissolution. Before is hope, and soft airs, and the flowers, and the sweet season of hay; and people will cross the fields, reading or walking with one another; and instead of the rain that soaks death into the heart of green things, will be the rain which they drink with delight; and there will be sleep on the grass at midday, and early rising in the morning, and long moonlight evenings.

For the qualities of sheer wit and humor, Swift had no superior, ancient or modern.

Jenny kissed me when we met, Jumping from the chair she sat in; Time, you thief, who love to get Sweets into your list, put that in: Say I'm weary, say I'm sad, Say that health and wealth have missed me, Say I'm growing old, but add-- Jenny kissed me!

When Goethe says that in every human condition foes lie in wait for us, "invincible only by cheerfulness and equanimity," he does not mean that we can at all times be really cheerful, or at a moment's notice; but that the endeavor to look at the better side of things will produce the habit, and that this habit is the surest safeguard against the danger of sudden evils.

Great women belong to history and to self-sacrifice, not to the annals of a stage, however dignified.

Table talk, to be perfect, should be sincere without bigotry, differing without discord, sometimes grave, always agreeable, touching on deep points, dwelling most on seasonable ones, and letting everybody speak and be heard.

A pleasure so exquisite as almost to amount to pain.

This garden has a soul, I know its moods.

Those who have lost an infant are never, in a way, without an infant.

Your second-hand bookseller is second to none in the worth of the treasures he dispenses.

Poetry is the breath of beauty.

Christmas is the glorious time of great Too-Much.

There is no greater mistake in the world than the looking upon every sort of nonsense as want of sense.

Cats at firesides live luxuriously and are the picture of comfort.