Leigh Hunt Quotations

Sympathizing and selfish people are alike, both given to tears.

The same people who can deny others everything are famous for refusing themselves nothing.

There are two worlds: the world we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imagination.

The person who can be only serious or only cheerful, is but half a man.

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

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

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

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

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

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

We are violets blue, For our sweetness found Careless in the mossy shades, Looking on the ground. Love's dropp'd eyelids and a kiss,-- Such our breath and blueness is.

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.

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

The perfection of conversational intercourse is when the breeding of high life is animated by the fervor of genius.

The two divinest things this world has got,A lovely woman in a rural spot!

The last excessive feelings of delight are always grave.

Beauty too often sacrifices to fashion. The spirit of fashion is not the beautiful, but the wilful; not the graceful, but the fantastic; not the superior in the abstract, but the superior in the worst of all concretes,-the vulgar.

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.

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.

Colors are the smiles of Nature. When they are extremely smiling, and break forth into other beauty besides, they are her laughs.

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.

Light is, perhaps, the most wonderful of all visible things.

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

A pleasure so exquisite as almost to amount to pain.

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.

I entrench myself in my books equally against sorrow and the weather.

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

The most tangible of all visible mysteries - fire.

The more sensible a woman is, supposing her not to be masculine, the more attractive she is in her proportionate power to entertain.

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.

Mirth itself is too often but melancholy in disguise.

We are slumberous poppies, Lords of Lethe downs, Some awake and some asleep, Sleeping in our crowns. What perchance our dreams may know, Let our serious may know.

There is scarcely a single joy or sorrow within the experience of our fellow-creatures which we have not tasted; yet the belief, in the good and beautiful has never forsaken us. It has been medicine to us in sickness, richness in poverty, and the best part of all that ever delighted us in health and success.

I am persuaded there is no such thing after all as a perfect enjoyment of solitude; for the more delicious the solitude the more one wants a companion.

Christmas is the glorious time of great Too-Much.

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.

Affection, like melancholy, magnifies trifles.

Nature, at all events, humanly speaking, is manifestly very fond of color; for she has made nothing without it. Her skies are blue; her fields, green; her waters vary with her skies; her animals, vegetables, minerals, are all colored. She paints a great any of them in apparently superfluous hues, as if to show the dullest eye how she loves color.

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

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

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!

It is our daily duty to consider that in all circumstances of life, pleasurable, painful, or otherwise, the conduct of others, especially of those in the same house; and that, as life is made up, for the most part, not of great occasions, but of small everyday moments, it is the giving to those moments their greatest amount of peace, pleasantness, and security, that contributes most to the sum of human good. Be peaceable. Be cheerful. Be true.

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.

This garden has a soul, I know its moods.

We lose in depth of expression when we go to inferior animals for comparisons with human beauty. Homer calls Juno ox-eyed; and the epithet suits well with the eyes of that goddess, because she may be supposed, with all her beauty, to want a certain humanity. Her large eyes look at you with a royal indifference.

Little eyes must be good-tempered or they are ruined. They have no other resource. But this will beautify them enough. They are made for laughing, and, should do their duty.

Large eyes were admired in Greece, where they still prevail. They are the finest of all when they have the internal look, which is not common. The stag or antelope eye of the Orientals is beautiful and lamping, but is accused of looking skittish and indifferent. "The epithet of 'stag-eyed,'" says Lady Wortley Montgu, speaking of a Turkish love-song, "pleases me extremely; and I think it a very lively image of the fire and indifference in his mistress' eye.

Mankind are creatures of books, as well as of other circumstances; and such they eternally remain,--proofs, that the race is a noble and believing race, and capable of whatever books can stimulate.

Oh for a seat in some poetic nook, Just hid with trees and sparkling with a brook!

Beauty too often sacrifices to fashion.

If you are melancholy for the first time, you will find, upon a little inquiry, that others have been melancholy many times, and yet are cheerful now.

Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair.

A friend of ours, who is an admirer of Isaac Walton, was struck, just as we were, with the likeness of the old angler's face to a fish.

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

The beautiful attracts the beautiful.

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.

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

Write me as one who loves his fellow men.

It is a delicious moment, certainly, that of being well nestled in bed, and feeling that you shall drop gently to sleep. The good is to come, not past; the limbs have just been tired enough to render the remaining in one posture delightful; the labour of the day is gone

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?

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 is evils.

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.

Did you ever observe that immoderate laughter always ends in a sigh?

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.

The loveliest hair is nothing, if the wearer is incapable of a grace.

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.

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

May exalting and humanizing thoughts forever accompany me, making me confident without pride, and modest without servility.

Improvement is nature.

For the most part, we should pray rather in aspiration than petition, rather by hoping than requesting; in which spirit also we may breathe a devout wish for a blessing on others upon occasions when it might be presumptuous to beg it.

Part of our good consists in the endeavor to do sorrows away, and in the power to sustain them when the endeavor fails,--to bear them nobly, and thus help others to bear them as well.

No wonder is greater than any other wonder, and if once explained ceases to be a wonder.

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.

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.

We really cannot see what equanimity there is in jerking a lacerated carp out of the water by the jaws, merely because it has no the power of making a noise; for we presume that the most philosophic of anglers would hardly delight in catching a shrieking fish.

Wit is the clash and reconcilement of incongruities; the meeting of extremes round a corner.

Central depth of purple, Leaves more bright than rose, Who shall tell what brightest thought Out of darkness grows? Who, through what funereal pain, Souls to love and peace attain? - Leigh Hunt (James Henry Leigh Hunt

Fishes do not roar; they cannot express any sound of suffering; and therefore the angler chooses to think they do not suffer, more than it is convenient for him to fancy. Now it is a poor sport that depends for its existence on the want of a voice in the sufferer, and of imagination in the sportsman.

An exquisite invention this, Worthy of Love's most honeyed kiss,-- This art of writing billet-doux-- In buds, and odors, and bright hues! In saying all one feels and thinks In clever daffodils and pinks; In puns of tulips; and in phrases, Charming for their truth, of daisies.

Green little vaulter, in the sunny grass, Catching your heart up at the feel of June, Sole noise that's heard amidst the lazy noon, When ev'n the bees lag at the summoning brass.

The fish is swift, small-needing, vague yet clear, A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves...

O scaly, slippery, wet, swift, staring wights, What is 't ye do? what life lead? eh, dull goggles? How do ye vary your vile days and nights? How pass your Sundays? Are ye still but joggles In ceaseless wash? Still nought but gapes and bites, And drinks, and stares, diversified with boggles.

Danger for danger's sake is senseless.

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.

Night's deepest gloom is but a calm; that soothes the weary mind: The labored days restoring balm; the comfort of mankind.

We must regard all matter as an intrusted secret which we believe the person concerned would wish to be considered as such. Nay, further still, we must consider all circumstances as secrets intrusted which would bring scandal upon another if told.

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

Fail not to call to mind, in the course of the twenty-fifth of this month, that the Divinest Heart that ever walked the earth was born on that day; and then smile and enjoy yourselves for the rest of it; for mirth is also of Heaven's making.

To receive a present handsomely and in a right spirit, even when you have none to give in return, is to give one in return.

God made both tears and laughter, and both for kind purposes; for as laughter enables mirth and surprise to breathe freely, so tears enable sorrow to vent itself patiently. Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair and madness.

There are two worlds: The world that we can measure with line and rule, and the world we feel with our hearts and imaginations.

One can love any man that is generous.

Whatever evil befalls us, we ought to ask ourselves... how we can turn it into good. So shall we take occasion, from one bitter root, to raise perhaps many flowers.

Where the mouth is sweet and the eyes intelligent, there is always the look of beauty, with a right heart.

Music is the medicine of the breaking heart.

Colors are the smiles of nature.

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

Patience and gentleness is power.

Occupation is the necessary basis of all enjoyment.

Poetry is the breath of beauty.