Hilaire Belloc: Making

Hilaire Belloc was writer. Explore interesting quotes on making.

Hilaire Belloc: 182 quotes8 likes

“I sincerely hope, trust, and pray that this part of my journey will not seem as dull to you as it did to me at the time, or as it does to me now while I write of it. But now I come to think of it, it cannot seem as dull, for I had to walk that wretched thirty miles or so all the day long, whereas you have not even to read it; for I am not going to say anything more about it, but lead you straight to the end.Oh, blessed quality of books, that makes them a refuge from living! For in a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and eternal.”

Hilaire Belloc

Source: The Path to Rome (1902), p. 201

“In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this that he cannot make; that he can befog or destroy, but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilisation exactly that has been true.”

Hilaire Belloc

Source: This and That and the Other (1912), Ch. XXXII : The Barbarians , p. 282
Context: In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this that he cannot make; that he can befog or destroy, but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilisation 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 creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.

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

Hilaire Belloc

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

“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)

“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

“The Microbe is so very small
You cannot make him out at all,
But many sanguine people hope
To see him through a microscope.”

Hilaire Belloc

"The Microbe"
More Beasts for Worse Children (1897)