Hilaire Belloc
Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.Collection: Life
An institute run with such knavish imbecility that if it were not the work of God it would not last a fortnight.Collection: Work
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.Collection: Love
When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.Collection: Hope
Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone.Collection: Alone
The pilgrim is humble and devout, and human, and charitable, and ready to smile and admire; therefore, he should comprehend the whole of his way, the people in it, and the hills and the clouds, and the habits of the various cities.Collection: Smile
Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.Collection: Death
When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside world which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.Collection: Friendship
All men have an instinct for conflict: at least, all healthy men.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Travel
The grace of God is courtesy.
Money gives me pleasure all the time.
There is not anything that can so suddenly flood the mind with shame as the conviction of ignorance, yet we are all ignorant of nearly everything there is to be known.
I'm tired of love; I'm still more tired of rhyme; but money gives me pleasure all the time.
Any subject can be made interesting, and therefore any subject can be made boring.
Oh, my friends, be warned by me, That breakfast, dinner, lunch and tea, Are all human frame requires.
It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation.
The moment a man talks to his fellows he begins to lie.
I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it.
Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.
The microbe is so very small: You cannot take him out at all.
Child! Do not throw this book about; refrain from the unholy pleasure of cutting all the pictures out.
Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nationalism or a common language.
Be content to remember that those who can make omelettes properly can do nothing else.
It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them.
Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.
The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine - but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.Collection: Catholic
Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world, which will shake off the domination of Europeans - still nominally Christian - and reappear as the prime enemy of our civilization? The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam.Collection: Christian
When the mass of families in a State are without property, then those who were once citizens become virtually slaves. The more the State steps in to enforce conditions of security and sufficiency; the more it regulates wages, provides compulsory insurance, doctoring, education, and in general takes over the lives of the wage-earners, for the benefit of the companies and men employing the wage-earners, the more is this condition of semi-slavery accentuated.Collection: Wisdom
The Church is a perpetually defeated thing that always outlives her conquerers.Collection: Church
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.Collection: Suggestions
Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, There’s always laughter and good red wine. At least I’ve always found it so. Benedicamus Domino!Collection: Laughter
When one remembers how the Catholic Church has been governed, and by whom, one realizes that it must have been divinely inspired to have survived at all.Collection: Catholic
The propaganda of Communism throughout the world, in organization and direction is in the hands of Jewish agents. As for anyone who does not know that the Bolshevist movement in Russia is Jewish, I can only say that he must be a man who is taken in by the suppression of our deplorable press.Collection: Taken
The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.Collection: Liberty
Time after time mankind is driven against the rocks of the horrid reality of a fallen creation. And time after time mankind must learn the hard lessons of history-the lessons that for some dangerous and awful reason we can't seem to keep in our collective memory.Collection: Memories
Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty.Collection: Liberty
I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative.Collection: Catholic
Before the curse of statistics fell upon mankind we lived a happy, innocent life, full of merriment and go and informed by fairly good judgment.Collection: Assessment
It has long been recognized by public men of all kinds. . . that statistics come under the head of lying, and that no lie is so false or inconclusive as that which is based on statistics.Collection: Funny
The world is full of double beds And most delightful maidenheads, Which being so, there's no excuse For sodomy or self-abuse.Collection: Self
The gentleman is generous and treats all men as his equals, especially those whom he feels to be inferior in rank and wealth.Collection: Men
Physicians of the utmost fame, Were called at once; but when they came They answered, as they took their fees, 'There is no Cure for this Disease.'Collection: Disease
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.Collection: Wisdom
Coupled with Usury, Unrestricted Competition destroys the small man for the profit of the great and in so doing produces that mass of economically unfree citizens whose very political freedom comes in question because it has no foundation in any economic freedom, that is, any useful proportion of property to support it. Political freedom without economic freedom is almost worthless, and it is because the modern proletariat has the one kind of freedom without the other that its rebellion is now threatening the very structure of the modern world.Collection: Wisdom
If antiquity be the only test of nobility, then cheese is a very noble thing ... The lineage of cheese is demonstrably beyond all record.Collection: Food
I said to Heart, "How goes it?" Heart replied: "Right as a Ribstone Pippin!" But it lied.Collection: Heart
Oh, you should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.Collection: Doubt
Remote and ineffectual don.Collection: College