Hilaire Belloc Quotes

143 Sourced Quotes

Believing Truth is staring at the sun
Which but destroys the power that could perceive.
So naught of our poor selves can be at one
With burning Truth, nor utterly believe.

Hilaire Belloc
Even where the Faith is preserved men pursue wealth and power inordinately. Where the Faith is lost they pursue nothing else.

Hilaire Belloc
The accursed power which stands on Privilege
(And goes with Women, and Champagne and Bridge)
Broke — and Democracy resumed her reign:
(Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne).

Hilaire Belloc
The Economic definition of Wealth is subtle and diflicult to appreciate, but it is absolutely essential to our study to get it clear at the outset and keep it firmly in mind.

Hilaire Belloc
I put my pencil upon the paper, doubtfully, and drew little lines, considering my theme. But I would not long hesitate in this manner, for I knew that all creation must be chaos first, and then gestures in the void before it can cast out the completed thing.

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
To exalt, enthrone, establish and defend,
To welcome home mankind's mysterious friend
Wine, true begetter of all arts that be;
Wine, privilege of the completely free;
Wine the recorder; wine the sagely strong;
Wine, bright avenger of sly-dealing wrong,
Awake, Ausonian Muse, and sing the vineyard song!

Hilaire Belloc
A smell of burning fills the startled air —
The Electrician is no longer there!

Hilaire Belloc
I said to Heart, "How goes it?" Heart replied:
"Right as a Ribstone Pippin!" But it lied.

Hilaire Belloc
Of this bad world the loveliest and the best Has smiled and said "Good Night," and gone to rest.

Hilaire Belloc
Oh, my friends, be warned by me,
That Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch, and Tea
Are all the Human Frame requires.

Hilaire Belloc
Death […] people nowadays seem to regard as something odd, whereas it is well known to be the commonest thing in the world.

Hilaire Belloc
What! Would you slap the Porcupine?
Unhappy child — desist!
Alas! That any friend of mine
Should turn Tupto-philist.

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
I recognised that I was (and I confessed) in that attitude of the mind wherein men admit mortality; something had already passed from me—I mean that fresh and vigorous morning of the eyes wherein the beauty of this land had been reflected as in a tiny mirror of burnished silver. Youth was gone out apart; it was loved and regretted, and therefore no longer possessed.

Hilaire Belloc
Dear Grandmamma, with what we give. We humbly pray that you may live. For many, many happy years: Although you bore us all to tears.

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

Hilaire Belloc
But if we are to retain freedom, then we can only do so by keeping the determining mass of the citizens the possessors of property with personal control over it, as individuals or as families. For property is the necessary condition of economic freedom in the full sense of that term. He that has not property is under economic servitude to him who has property, whether the possessor of it be another individual or the State.

Hilaire Belloc
The Polar Bear is unaware Of cold that cuts me through: For why? He has a coat of hair, I wish I had one too!

Hilaire Belloc
The old freedom sufficiently survives in the mind of the wage earner to give him the illusion that, while accepting insurance and maintenance from the capitalist state, he can still be a full citizen. He thinks he can have his cake and eat it too. He is mistaken. The great capitalists who procured these regulations from the politicians knew what they were at. They were catching their proletariat in a net, and now they hold it fast.

Hilaire Belloc
No one truly loves history who is not more exalted according to the greater age of the new things he finds.

Hilaire Belloc
Protest against Industrial Capitalism from one aspect or another is universal: so was the protest against the condition of European religion at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Hilaire Belloc
The student must be careful in calculations involving the decimal point to put it in its exact place, neither too much to the right nor too much to the left.

Hilaire Belloc
Life is a vale, its paths are dark and rough Only because we do not know enough. When Science has discovered something more We shall be happier than we were before.

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

Hilaire Belloc
The larger the unit of capital present, the easier the transaction called emission of credit. Centralized lending of this kind (which is today universal) actively promotes the absorption of the small man by the great, the reduction of small property owners to a proletarian condition.

Hilaire Belloc
It is therefore our business to restore economic freedom through the restoration of the only institution under which it flourishes, which institution is Property. The problem before us is, how to restore Property so that it shall be, as it was not so long ago, a general institution.

Hilaire Belloc
Had there been any existent vital and energetic institution left in Society after the Reformation for the use of small property in coordinated form-that is, in combination, so that the average man's holding could be put to useful purpose in company with the holdings of a great number of other men of his own sort, the new evils would not have arisen.

Hilaire Belloc
The double analysis kills the single analysis, and the treble kills the double, until at last a sufficiency of statistics comes very near to common sense.

Hilaire Belloc