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Hilaire Belloc: 182 quotes8 likes

“Be content to remember that those who can make omelettes properly can do nothing else.”

IV. On Making an Omelette
A Conversation with a Cat, and Others (1931)

“Of courtesy it is much less
Than courage of heart or holiness
Yet in my walks it seems to me
That the Grace of God is in courtesy.”

Hilaire Belloc

"Courtesy"
Verses (1910)

“The tender Evenlode that makes
Her meadows hush to hear the sound
Of waters mingling in the brakes,
And binds my heart to English ground.A lovely river, all alone,
She lingers in the hills and holds
A hundred little towns of stone,
Forgotten in the western wolds.”

Hilaire Belloc

"Dedicatory Ode", stanzas 31–32
Verses (1910)

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

Hilaire Belloc

Source: The Four Men: A Farrago (1911), p. 27

“Wealth, for the purposes of economic study, is confined to those values attaching to material objects through the action of man, which values can be exchanged /or other values.”

Hilaire Belloc

Source: Economics for Helen (1924), Ch. 1 : What is Wealth?

“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

"Epitaph on the Politician Himself"
Hilaire Belloc (1925)

“It is a consolation to remember that corruption pushed beyond a certain point provides its own remedy, and that this sort of thing cannot indefinitely continue; but it is less consoling to remember another truth, to wit, that the correction of political and social evil may come in the form of irremediable catastrophe, and that the innocent, who are the greater number, would then suffer most. It is still less consoling to remember the universal human experience that when evil is redressed by the only partly conscious force of reaction, it is not succeeded by a corresponding good, but by some other new and unexpected evil.”

Hilaire Belloc

Source: The Cruise of the 'Nona (1925), pp. 248–9

“It is in the irony of Providence that the more man comes to control the material world about him, the more does he lose control over the effects of his action; and it is when he is remaking the world most speedily that he knows least whither he is driving.”

Hilaire Belloc

Source: The Cruise of the 'Nona (1925), p. 177

“I shoot the Hippopotamus
With bullets made of platinum,
Because if I use leaden ones
His hide is sure to flatten 'em.”

Hilaire Belloc book The Bad Child's Book of Beasts

"The Hippopotamus"
The Bad Child's Book of Beasts (1896)

“So touch my dying lip: so bridge that deep:
So pledge my waking from the gift of sleep,
And, sacramental, raise me the Divine:
Strong brother in God and last companion, Wine.”

Hilaire Belloc

Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine (1932)

“How did the party go in Portman Square?
I cannot tell you; Juliet was not there.
And how did Lady Gaster's party go?
Juliet was next me and I do not know.”

Hilaire Belloc

"Juliet", Sonnets and Verse (1954)

“May all good fellows that here agree
Drink Audit Ale in heaven with me,
And may all my enemies go to hell!
Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël!
May all my enemies go to hell!
Noël! Noël!”

Hilaire Belloc

drinking song, p. 126
The Four Men: A Farrago (1911)

“It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation.”

Hilaire Belloc

Letter to G.K. Chesterton (12 December 1917), quoted in Robert Speaight, The Life of Hilaire Belloc (London: Hollis & Carter, 1957), p. 355

“The object of a religion or a philosophy is not to make men wealthy or powerful, but to make them, in the last issue, happy: that is, to fulfil their being.”

Hilaire Belloc

Source: Survivals and New Arrivals (1929), Ch. III Survivals (iii) The "Wealth and Power" Argument

“How slow the Shadow creeps: but when 'tis past,
How fast the Shadows fall. How fast! How fast!”

Hilaire Belloc

"On the Same" (On a Sundial II)
Sonnets and Verse (1938)

“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

"Dedication on the Gift of a Book to a Child"
Verses (1910)

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

Hilaire Belloc

Source: Survivals and New Arrivals (1929), Ch. III Survivals (iii) The "Wealth and Power" Argument

“The Big Baboon is found upon
The plains of Cariboo:
He goes about with nothing on
(A shocking thing to do).
But if he dressed respectably
And let his whiskers grow,
How like this Big Baboon would be
To Mister So-and-so!”

Hilaire Belloc book The Bad Child's Book of Beasts

"The Big Baboon"
The Bad Child's Book of Beasts (1896)

“For the line of cleavage does not fall between the various groups, Catholic, Agnostic, Evangelical, or what not, but between the Catholic Church and all else. She is unique, and at issue with the world.”

Hilaire Belloc

Source: Survivals and New Arrivals (1929), Ch. IV The Main Opposition (ii) Anti-Clericalism

“Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.”

Hilaire Belloc

"On Statistics"
The Silence of the Sea (1940)