Top 109 Quotes & Sayings by Leigh Hunt

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

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

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

Stolen kisses are always sweetest.

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

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

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

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

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

Colors are the smiles of nature.

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 groundwork of all happiness is health.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

One can love any man that is generous.

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

Patience and gentleness is power.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Improvement is nature.

Happy opinions are the wine of the heart.

Music is the medicine of the breaking heart.

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

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

Occupation is the necessary basis of all enjoyment.

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

Affection, like melancholy, magnifies trifles.

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

The most tangible of all visible mysteries - fire.

The beautiful attracts the beautiful.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Poetry is the breath of beauty.

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.

Beauty too often sacrifices to fashion.

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.

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

"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.

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.

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

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.

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.