Hilaire Belloc > Quotes

“When I am dead, I hope it may be said: "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!”
― Hilaire Belloc

“I have wandered all my life, and I have traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“The Church is a perpetually defeated thing that always outlives her conquerers.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“When I am dead, I hope it may be said, 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
― Hillaire Belloc

“Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“From quiet homes and first beginning,
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There's nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter and the love of friends.”
― Hilaire Belloc - Verses 10 "Dedicatory Ode"

“For no one, in our long decline,
So dusty, spiteful and divided,
Had quite such pleasant friends as mine,
Or loved them half as much as I did.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“It has been discovered that with a dull urban population, all formed under a mechanical system of State education, a suggestion or command, however senseless and unreasoned, will be obeyed if it be sufficiently repeated.”
― Hilaire Belloc, An Essay on the Restoration of Property

“The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“Oh, you should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!”
― Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome

“When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside world which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“No, she laughed." How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say ‘No’ at the same time, it sounds like neighing — yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, with an indolent expression and an undulating throat; like an unsuccessful literary man.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“If we are to be happy, decent and secure of our souls: drink some kind of fermented liquor with one's food; go on the water from time to time; dance on occasions, and sing in a chorus...”
― Hilaire Belloc

“These are the advantages of travel, that one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet, and that one feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind”
― Hillaire Belloc, First and Last

“Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine – but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight”
― Hilaire Belloc

“Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man.”
― Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome

“Do not, I beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces already in dissolution. You have mistaken the hour of the night; it is already morning.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“Like most modern words, "Heresy" is used both vaguely and diversely. It is used vaguely because the modern mind is as averse to precision in ideas as it is enamored of precision in measurement. It is used diversely because, according to the man who uses it, it may represent any one of fifty things.”
― Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies and Survivals and New Arrivals

“Steep are the seas and savaging and cold
In broken waters terrible to try;
And vast against the winter night the wold,
And harbourless for any sail to lie.
But you shall lead me to the lights, and I
Shall hymn you in a harbour story told.
This is the faith that I have held and hold,
And this is that in which I mean to die.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, there’s always laughter and good red wine.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.”
― Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State

“In the perfect Capitalist State there would be no food available for the non-owner save when he was actually engaged in Production, and that absurdity would, by quickly ending all human lives save those of the owners, put a term to the arrangement.”
― Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State

“The accursed power which stands on privilege( and goes with women, champagne and bridge)
Broke - and democracy resumed her reign ( which goes with bridge and women and champagne.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“The prospect of refreshment at the charges of another is an opportunity never to be neglected by men of clear commercial judgment.”
― Hilaire Belloc, The Mercy of Allah