Leigh Hunt Quotes

84 Sourced Quotes

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, minerals, vegetables, are all colored. She paints a great many of them in apparently superfluous hues, as if to show the dullest eye how she loves colour.

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

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
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
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
Even in envy may be discerned something of an instinct of justice, something of a wish to see universal fair-play, and things on a level.

Leigh Hunt
A playful moderation in politics is just as absurd as a remonstrative whisper to a mob.

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

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

Leigh Hunt
There are two worlds; the world that we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imaginations. To be sensible of the truth of only one of these, is to know the truth but by halves.

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
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
His forehead was prodigious—a great piece of placid marble; and his fine eyes, in which all the activity of his mind seemed to concentrate, moved under it with a sprightly ease, as if it was pastime to them to carry all that thought.
Of coleridge

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

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

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

Leigh Hunt
Poetry, in the most comprehensive application of the term, I take to be the flower of any kind of experience, rooted in truth, and issuing forth into beauty.

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
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
A mere gossiping entertainment: a few child's squalls, a few mumbled amens, and a few mumbled cakes, and a few smirks accompanied by a few fees.
On the christening of his godson

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

Leigh Hunt