Hilaire Belloc Quotes

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

Upon being asked by a Reader whether the verses contained in this book were true. And is it True? It is not True. And if it were it wouldn’t do, For people such as me and you Who pretty nearly all day long Are doing something rather wrong. Because if things were really so, You would have perished long ago, And I would not have lived to write The noble lines that meet your sight, Nor B. T. B. survived to draw The nicest things you ever saw. H. B.

The world is full of double beds
And most delightful maidenheads,
Which being so, there’s no excuse
For sodomy or self-abuse.

los bárbaros construyen sus casas separadas, y los hombres civilizados, juntas.

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!

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
'His sins were scarlet, But his books were read'.

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.

There is in Nothing something so majestic and so high that it is a fascination and spell to regard it. Is it not that which Mankind, after the great effort of life, at last attains, and that which alone can satisfy Mankind's desire? Is it not that which is the end of so many generations of analysis, the final word of Philosophy, and the goal of the search for reality? Is it not the very matter of our modern creed in which the great spirits of our time repose, and is it not, as it were, the culmination of their intelligence? It is indeed the sum and meaning of all around!

Ha de saberse que si se cede a una tentación, muy luego se presenta como el rayo la oportunidad de incurrir en ella.

The poet Hilaire Belloc included the following poem about the dodo in his Bad Child's Book of Beasts from 1896:

The Dodo used to walk around,
And take the sun and air.
The sun yet warms his native ground –
The Dodo is not there!

The voice which used to squawk and squeak
Is now for ever dumb –
Yet may you see his bones and beak
All in the Mu-se-um.[147]

[N]othing is worthwhile on this unhappy earth except the fulfilment of a man's desire.

You who go in railways are necessarily shut up in long valleys and even sometimes by the wall of earth. Even those who bicycle or drive see these sights but rarely and with consecution, since roads also avoid climbing save where they are forced to it, as over certain passes. It is only by following the straight line onwards that anyone can pass from ridge to ridge and have this full picture of the way he has been.

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

economics are but an expression of the mind and do not (as the poor blind slaves of the great cities think) mould the mind.

bridgehead beyond, upon the southern shore. And thereby, should help come to them, they might cross the Loire in strength into Charles’s land and perhaps overcome him yet.