Leigh Hunt Quotes

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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
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 pleasure so exquisite as almost to amount to pain.

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The pretension is nothing; the performance every thing. A good apple is better than an insipid peach.

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
Rossini, in music, is the genius of sheer animal spirits. It is a species as inferior to that of Mozart, as the cleverness of a smart boy is to that of a man of sentiment; but it is genius nevertheless.

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

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

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

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

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

Leigh Hunt
There lived a knight, when knighthood was in flow'r, Who charmed alike the tilt-yard and the bower.

Leigh Hunt
Whenever evil befalls us, we ought to ask ourselves, after the first suffering, how we can turn it into good. So shall we take occasion, from one bitter root, to raise perhaps many flowers.

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

Leigh Hunt
This Adonis in loveliness was a corpulent man of fifty.

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

Leigh Hunt
And showed the names whom love of God had bless'd, And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

Leigh Hunt
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.

Leigh Hunt