Leigh Hunt Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

A pleasure so exquisite as almost to amount to pain.

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.

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

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

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

The rapturuous, wild, and ineffable pleasure of drinking at somebody else's expense

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

Improvement is nature.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Write me as one who loves his fellow men.

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?

Mirth itself is too often but melancholy in disguise.

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

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.

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

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

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.

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!) Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace.

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