James Henry Leigh Hunt (19 October 1784 – 28 August 1859), best known as Leigh Hunt, was an English critic, essayist, poet, and writer.
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.
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.
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.
One can love any man that is generous.
The two divinest things this world has got,A lovely woman in a rural spot!
Oh for a seat in some poetic nook, Just hid with trees and sparkling with a brook!
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.
Cats at firesides live luxuriously and are the picture of comfort.
Patience and gentleness is power.
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?
The person who can be only serious or only cheerful, is but half a man.
It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.
Stolen kisses are always sweetest.
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.
Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair.
An author is like a baker; it is for him to make the sweets, and others to buy and enjoy them.
The only place a new hat can be carried into with safety is a church, for there is plenty of room there.
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.
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.
I am persuaded there is no such thing after all as a perfect enjoyment of solitude; for the more delicious the solitude the more one wants a companion.