Hilaire Belloc famous quotes

Remote and ineffectual don.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#College #University

The grace of God is courtesy.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Grace #Courtesy #Grace Of God

The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Liberty #Libertarian #Wealth

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
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Men #Advantage #Mankind

The 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

#Catholic #Church #Divinity

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

#Laughter #Wine #Shining

The Church is a perpetually defeated thing that always outlives her conquerers.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Church #Defeated

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

#Funny #Death #Reading

It was the Faith which gradually and indirectly transformed the slave into the serf, and the serf into the free peasant. . . . You will not be able to set up in a pagan or an heretical or a wholly indifferent society the institutions characteristic of economic freedom; you will not be able to curb competition which alone would be sufficient to destroy such freedom, nor pursue permanently and consecutively anyone part of the program. The thing must be done as a whole, and it can be done as a whole only by the ambient influence of Catholicism.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Competition #Would Be #Done

Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Victory #Triumph #Statistics

Any subject can be made interesting, and therefore any subject can be made boring.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Interesting #Boring #Made

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

#Life #Travel #Differences

We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Travel #Carpe Diem #Journey

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

#Real #Writing #People

Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Writing #Army #Blow

It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Song #Singing #Second Best

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

#Loneliness #Being Alone #Men

I'm tired of love; I'm still more tired of rhyme; but money gives me pleasure all the time.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Love #Money #Tired

Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Latin #Soul #Tea

I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Book #Writing #Dull

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

#Suggestions #Population #Dull

Oh, my friends, be warned by me, That breakfast, dinner, lunch and tea, Are all human frame requires.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Lunch #Tea #Breakfast

Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Gun #Maxims

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

#Water #Soul #Goes On

I shoot the Hippopotamus with bullets made of platinum, because if I use the leaden one his hide is sure to flatten em.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Animal #Ems #Use

For every time she shouted "Fire!" They only answered "Little liar!" And therefore when her aunt returned, Matilda, and the house, were burned.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Time #Liars #Aunt

In the midst of all these innumerable forms of a common protest and universal ill-ease there has grown up one definite body of doctrine whose adherents are called Communists and who desired the total subversion of what had been, hitherto unquestioned among civilized European men, the general doctrines of property and individual freedom.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Men #Doctrine #Ease

I am a Catholic. As far as possible I go to Mass every day. This is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative!
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Catholic #Thank God #Rosary

I am a sundial, and I make a botch Of what is done much better by a watch.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Time #Watches #Done

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

#Ridiculous #Politician #Acquaintance

Child! do not throw this book about Refrain from the unholy pleasure Of cutting all the pictures out! Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Children #Book #Cutting

The choice lies between property on the one hand and slavery, public or private, on the other. There is no third issue.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Lying #Hands #Issues

The moment a man talks to his fellows he begins to lie.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Lying #Men #Moments

Coupled with Usury, Unrestricted Competition destroys the small man for the profit of the great and in so doing produces that mass of economically unfree citizens whose very political freedom comes in question because it has no foundation in any economic freedom, that is, any useful proportion of property to support it. Political freedom without economic freedom is almost worthless, and it is because the modern proletariat has the one kind of freedom without the other that its rebellion is now threatening the very structure of the modern world.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Wisdom #Men #Political

I forget the name of the place; I forget the name of the girl; but the wine was Chambertin.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Girl #Wine #Names

If antiquity be the only test of nobility, then cheese is a very noble thing ... The lineage of cheese is demonstrably beyond all record.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Noble #Records #Tests

If you can describe clearly without a diagram the proper way of making this or that knot, then you are a master of the English language.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Writing #Way #Language

The gentleman is generous and treats all men as his equals, especially those whom he feels to be inferior in rank and wealth.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Men #Gentleman #Language

Money gives me pleasure all the time.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Giving #Pleasure

Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Writing #Empty #Worst

Writing itself is a bad enough trade, rightly held up to ridicule and contempt by the greater part of mankind, and especially by those who do real work, plowing, riding, sailing
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Real #Writing #Sailing

If any man gives you a wine you can't bear, don't say it is beastly... But don't say you like it. You are endangering your soul and the use of wine as well... Seek out some other wine good to your taste.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Wine #Men #Giving

The Rich arrived in pairs And also in Rolls Royces; They talked of their affairs In loud and strident voices... The Poor arrived in Fords, Whose features they resembled; They laughed to see so many Lords And Ladies all assembled. The People in Between Looked underdone and harassed, And our of place and mean, And Horribly embarrassed.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Mean #Voice #People

The microbe is so very small: You cannot take him out at all.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Science #Microbes

Great artistic talent in any direction... is hardly inherent to the man. It comes and goes; it is often possessed only for a short phase in his life; it hardly ever colors his character as a whole and has nothing to do with the moral and intellectual stuff of the mind and soul. Many great artists, perhaps most great artists, have been poor fellows indeed, whom to know was to despise.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Character #Artist #Men

There is no one who has cooked but has discovered that each particular dish depends for its rightness upon some little point which he is never told. It is not only so of cooking: it is so of splicing a rope; of painting a surface of wood; of mixing mortar; of almost anything you like to name among the immemorial human arts.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Art #Names #Cooking

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Biographies #Admirable #Autobiography

You are my cat, and I am your human.
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Cat #Humans

It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation
-- Hilaire Belloc

#Lying #Sometimes #Interest