Hilaire Belloc Quotes

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.

Human society cannot carry on without some creed, because a code and a character are the
product of a creed.

The reason the Dead do not return nowadays is the boredom of it.

The Barbarian hopes — and that is the very mark of him — that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilisation 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 for ever marvelling that civilisation should have offended him with priests and soldiers.

But anyhow, when you take up your pen you do something devilish pleasing: there is a prospect before you. You are going to develop a germ: I don't know what it is, and I promise you I won't call it creation — but possibly a god is creating through you, and at least you are making believe at creation. Anyhow, it is a sense of mastery and of origin, and you know that when you have done, something will be added to the world, and little destroyed.

The Science of Economics does not deal with true happiness nor even with well-being in material things. It deals with a strictly limited field of what is called "Economic Wealth," and if it goes outside its own boundaries it goes wrong.

I watched a train come in. It was full of
tourists, who (it may have been a subjective illusion) seemed to me common
and worthless people, and sad into the bargain.

This is what seems to me the grave, perhaps the gravest, evil of our time. For history is always somewhat false, and by its falsehood always somewhat warps judgment; but history written on the basis of deliberate falsehood and of repeated and prolonged suppression would be another matter altogether. It would not be history at all.
Now history is the memory of the race; and a man without memory is no longer a man.

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

Now there is discoverable in man, Freewill. His actions are of moral value to him if they are undertaken upon his own initiative; not if they are undertaken under compulsion. Therefore the use of choice is necessary to human dignity. A man deprived of choice is
by that the less a man, and this we all show through the repugnance excited in us by unauthorized restraint and subjection, through coercion rather than authority, to another’s will. We cannot do good, or even evil, unless we do it freely; and if we admit the idea of good at all in human society, freedom must be its accompaniment.

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

It is further an admitted historical truth, which no one denies, that such an institution putting forth such a claim has been present among mankind for many centuries. Many through antagonism or lack of knowledge deny the identity of the Catholic Church today with the original Christian society.

There is always something more to be said, and it is always so difficult to turn up the splice neatly at the edges.

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!

The prospect of refreshment at the charges of another is an opportunity never to be neglected by men of clear commercial judgment.