Leigh Hunt Quotes & Sayings

Poetry is the breath of beauty. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

If you ever have to support a flagging conversation, introduce the topic of eating. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

Colors are the smiles of nature. — Leigh Hunt

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

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. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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

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. — Leigh Hunt

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

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. — Leigh Hunt

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

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

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. — Leigh Hunt

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice. — Leigh Hunt

The last excessive feelings of delight are always grave. — Leigh Hunt

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

The beautiful attracts the beautiful. — Leigh Hunt

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

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? — Leigh Hunt

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

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

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. — Leigh Hunt

Stolen kisses are always sweetest. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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

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. — Leigh Hunt

Mere grimness is as easy as grinning; but it requires something to put a handsome face on a story. Narratives become of suspicious merit in proportion as they lean to Newgate-like offenses, particularly of blood and wounds ... — Leigh Hunt

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

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. — Leigh Hunt

If you become a Nun, dear,
The bishop Love will be;
The Cupids every one, dear!
Will chant-'We trust in thee!' — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

Occupation is the necessary basis of all enjoyment. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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

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

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. — Leigh Hunt

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

One can love any man that is generous. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair. — Leigh Hunt

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

The most tangible of all visible mysteries - fire. — Leigh Hunt

Mirth itself is too often but melancholy in disguise. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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

Patience and gentleness is power. — Leigh Hunt

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

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. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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

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

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

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

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 — Leigh Hunt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Leigh Hunt

The groundwork of all happiness is health. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

Improvement is nature. — Leigh Hunt

Music is the medicine of the breaking heart. — Leigh Hunt

I entrench myself in books equally against sorrow and the weather. — Leigh Hunt

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 — Leigh Hunt

A pleasure so exquisite as almost to amount to pain. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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

Christmas is the glorious time of great Too-Much. — Leigh Hunt

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

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. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

Danger for danger's sake is senseless. — Leigh Hunt

This garden has a soul, I know its moods. — Leigh Hunt

Affection, like melancholy, magnifies trifles. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

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! — 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. — Leigh Hunt

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. — Leigh Hunt

Write me as one who loves his fellow men. — Leigh Hunt

Happy opinions are the wine of the heart. — Leigh Hunt

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