James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.
Leigh Hunt
Colours are the smiles of Nature … her laughs, as in the flowers.
Entire love is a worship and cannot be angry.
Great women belong to history and to self-sacrifice.
Improvement is Nature.
Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
Life, upon the whole, is much more pleasurable than painful, otherwise we should not feel pain so impatiently when it comes.
Light is, perhaps, the most wonderful of all visible things.
Night’s deepest gloom is but a calm, / That soothes the wearied mind; / The labour’d day’s restoring balm, / The comfort of mankind.
No wonder is greater than any other wonder, and if once explained, it ceases to be a wonder.
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.
Sympathising and selfish people are alike given to tears.
Taste is the very maker of judgment.
The man who can be nothing but serious or nothing but merry is but half a man.
They who have lost an infant are never, as it were, without an infant child.
What the poet has to cultivate above all things is love and truth;—what he has to avoid, like poison, is the fleeting and the false.
When Goethe says that in every human condition foes lie in wait for us, “invincible save 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 endeavour 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.