Leigh Hunt Quotes

“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

“Colors are the smiles of nature.”

— Leigh Hunt

“Stolen kisses are always sweetest.”

— Leigh Hunt

“The groundwork of all happiness is health.”

— Leigh Hunt

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

— Leigh Hunt

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

— Leigh Hunt

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

— Leigh Hunt

One can love any man that is generous.

— Leigh Hunt

“Poetry is the breath of beauty.”

— Leigh Hunt

“Music is the medicine of the breaking heart.”

— 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

“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

“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

“Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair.”

— Leigh Hunt

“A pleasure so exquisite as almost to amount to pain.”

— 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

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

— Leigh Hunt

Mirth itself is too often but melancholy in disguise.

— 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

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

“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

“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

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

— 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

“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

“Write me as one who loves his fellow men.”

— Leigh Hunt

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

— 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

“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

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

— Leigh Hunt

“Improvement is nature.”

— 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

“This garden has a soul, I know its moods.”

— 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

“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

“Christmas is the glorious time of great Too-Much.”

— 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

Danger for danger's sake is senseless.

— Leigh Hunt

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

— 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

“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

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

— Leigh Hunt