110+ Hilaire Belloc Quotes On Education, Religion And Communism

Hilaire Belloc was an English Poet, historian, and essayist who lived during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is best known for his humorous verse, such as Matilda Who Told Lies, and for his Catholic political activism. Belloc was also a prolific writer of history and biography, and his works on the French Revolution and Thomas More remain widely read today. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Hilaire Belloc on education, religion, life.

Top 10 Hilaire Belloc Quotes

1. I have wandered all my life, and I have traveled; the difference between the two is this -- we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.
2. We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.
3. Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, There’s always laughter and good red wine. At least I’ve always found it so. Benedicamus Domino!
4. The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.
5. The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, with an indolent expression and an undulating throat; like an unsuccessful literary man.
6. When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.
7. 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.
8. I shoot the Hippopotamus with bullets made of platinum, because if I use the leaden one his hide is sure to flatten em.
9. 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.
10. Loss and possession, Death and life are one. There falls no shadow where There shines no sun.

Hilaire Belloc Image Quotes

The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself. — Hilaire Belloc

Hilaire Belloc Short Quotes

• For one thing, I was no longer alone; a man is never alone with the wind-and the boat made three.
• All men have an instinct for conflict: at least, all healthy men.
• The grace of God is courtesy.
• The sea drives truth into a man like salt.
• When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.
• Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight. But roaring Bill, who killed him, thought it right.
• I forget the name of the place; I forget the name of the girl; but the wine was Chambertin.
• Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.
• It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them.
• [A]lways keep a-hold of Nurse For fear of finding something worse

Hilaire Belloc Quotes About Life

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. — Hilaire Belloc

Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun. — Hilaire Belloc

How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say 'No' at the same time, it sounds like neighing - yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up. — Hilaire Belloc

Hilaire Belloc Quotes About Love

I'm tired of love; I'm still more tired of rhyme; but money gives me pleasure all the time. — Hilaire Belloc

Money gives me pleasure all the time. — Hilaire Belloc

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. — Hilaire Belloc

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

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. — Hilaire Belloc

For no one, in our long decline, So dusty, spiteful and divided, Had quite such pleasant friends as mine, Or loved them half as much as I did. — Hilaire Belloc

Hilaire Belloc Quotes About Books

When I am dead, I hope it is said, 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read'. — Hilaire Belloc

I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it. — Hilaire Belloc

There are few greater temptations on earth than to stay permanently at Oxford in meditation, and to read all the books in the Bodlean. — Hilaire Belloc

Child! Do not throw this book about;Refrain from the unholy pleasureOf cutting all the pictures out!Preserve it as your chiefest treasure. — Hilaire Belloc

Child! Do not throw this book about; refrain from the unholy pleasure of cutting all the pictures out. — Hilaire Belloc

Hilaire Belloc Quotes About Soul

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

To walk because it is good for you warps the sould, just as it warps the soul for a man to talk for hire or because he think it his duty. — Hilaire Belloc

It seems to be saying perpetually; 'I am the end of the nineteenth century; I am glad they built me of iron; let me rust.' ... It is like a passing fool in a crowd of the University, a buffoon in the hall; for all the things in Paris has made, it alone has neither wits nor soul. — Hilaire Belloc

If we are to be happy, decent and secure of our souls: drink some kind of fermented liquor with one's food; go on the water from time to time; dance on occasions, and sing in a chorus. — Hilaire Belloc

If any man gives you a wine you can't bear, don't say it is beastly... But don't say you like it. You are endangering your soul and the use of wine as well... Seek out some other wine good to your taste. — Hilaire Belloc

Hilaire Belloc Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Hilaire Belloc

The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself. — Hilaire Belloc

That I grow sour, who only lack delight; That I descend to sneer, who only grieve: That from my depth I should contemn your height; That with my blame my mockery you receive; Huntress and splendour of the woodland night, Diana of this world, do not believe. — Hilaire Belloc

Slowly but certainly the proletarian, by every political reform which secures his well-being under new rules of insurance, of State control in education, of State medicine and the rest, is developing into the slave, leaving the rich man apart and free. All industrial civilization is clearly moving towards the re-establishment of the Servile State. — Hilaire Belloc

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. — Hilaire Belloc

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. — Hilaire Belloc

The gentleman is generous and treats all men as his equals, especially those whom he feels to be inferior in rank and wealth. — Hilaire Belloc

Oh, my friends, be warned by me, That breakfast, dinner, lunch and tea, Are all human frame requires. — Hilaire Belloc

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

When the mass of men are dispossessed - own nothing - they become wholly dependent upon the owners; and when those owners are in active competition to lower the cost of production the mass of men whom they exploit not only lack the power to order their own lives, but suffer from want and insecurity as well. — Hilaire Belloc

Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death. — Hilaire Belloc

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. — Hilaire Belloc

Ownership is not a general feature of our society, determining its character. On the contrary, dependence on a precarious wage at the will of others is the general feature of our society. — Hilaire Belloc

The term "Socialism" becomes a common label for the various theories of attack upon the principle of property, the various policies of communal control at the expense of the family and individual freedom. — Hilaire Belloc

The restoration of property would be a complicated, arduous and presumably a lengthy business; the transformation of a Capitalist Society into a Communist one needs nothing but the extension of existing conditions. — Hilaire Belloc

There is already something like a Jewish monopoly in high finance... here is the same element of Jewish monopoly in the silver trade, and in the control of various other metals, notably lead, nickel, quicksilver. What is most disquieting of all, this tendency to monopoly is spreading like a disease. — Hilaire Belloc

The power of the State must be invoked for restoring economic freedom just as it has been invoked for destroying economic freedom. — Hilaire Belloc

In the midst of all these innumerable forms of a common protest and universal ill-ease there has grown up one definite body of doctrine whose adherents are called Communists and who desired the total subversion of what had been, hitherto unquestioned among civilized European men, the general doctrines of property and individual freedom. — Hilaire Belloc

Writing itself is a bad enough trade, rightly held up to ridicule and contempt by the greater part of mankind, and especially by those who do real work, plowing, riding, sailing — Hilaire Belloc

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. — Hilaire Belloc

The whole art of the political speech is to put 'nothing' into it. It is much more difficult than it sounds. — Hilaire Belloc

Under the old philosophy which had governed the high Middle Ages things had been everywhere towards a condition of Society in which property was well distributed throughout the community, and thus the family rendered independent. — Hilaire Belloc

If you can describe clearly without a diagram the proper way of making this or that knot, then you are a master of the English language. — Hilaire Belloc

If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course. — Hilaire Belloc

If antiquity be the only test of nobility, then cheese is a very noble thing ... The lineage of cheese is demonstrably beyond all record. — Hilaire Belloc

Such are the mass of the supporters of either party. They derive their political opinions originally from some family tradition or some fanciful preference, but they back them with all the passion of sportsmen. In a vague subconscious way they know it is a game, but they happen to enjoy playing the game. — Hilaire Belloc

Dear Grandmamma, with what we give. We humbly pray that you may live. For many, many happy years: Although you bore us all to tears. — Hilaire Belloc

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. — Hilaire Belloc

The accursed power which stands on privilege( and goes with women, champagne and bridge) Broke - and democracy resumed her reign ( which goes with bridge and women and champagne. — Hilaire Belloc

[Heresy is] the dislocation of a complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein. — Hilaire Belloc

It is therefore our business to restore economic freedom through the restoration of the only institution under which it flourishes, which institution is Property. The problem before us is, how to restore Property so that it shall be, as it was not so long ago, a general institution. — Hilaire Belloc

The Devil, having nothing else to do Went off to tempt my Lady Poltagrue. My Lady, tempted by a private whim, To his extreme annoyance, tempted him. — Hilaire Belloc

Consider in what way the industrial system developed upon capitalist lines. Why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the new methods? Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in that of contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed? — Hilaire Belloc

Remote and ineffectual don. — Hilaire Belloc

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

The microbe is so very small: You cannot take him out at all. — Hilaire Belloc

The Rich arrived in pairsAnd also in Rolls Royces;They talked of their affairsIn loud and strident voices...The Poor arrived in Fords,Whose features they resembled;They laughed to see so many LordsAnd Ladies all assembled.The People in BetweenLooked underdone and harassed,And our of place and mean,And Horribly embarrassed. — Hilaire Belloc

... But as a Godless greed pursued its career from excess to excess, it provoked a sort of twin hostile brother, equally Godless, born in the same atmosphere of utter disregard for the foundational virtues of humility and charity. This hostile twin brother of Capitalism was destined to be called Communism, and is today setting out to murder its elder. — Hilaire Belloc

The smaller man approaching our modern banking system, which controls all issue of credit and therefore pretty well all our industrial and commercial activities, is not what the controllers of that credit call "interesting." He borrows with difficulty and upon high terms, and must pledge security out of all proportion to that which his richer rival has to put down. — Hilaire Belloc

The larger unit can borrow more easily in proportion than the smaller. It can especially tap bank credit more easily and bank credit is, to-day, the chief factor in economic activity of all kinds. — Hilaire Belloc

For every time she shouted "Fire!" They only answered "Little liar!" And therefore when her aunt returned, Matilda, and the house, were burned. — Hilaire Belloc

Put you hand before your eyes and remember, you that have walked, the places from which you have walked away, and the wilderness into which you manfully turned the steps of your abandonment ... It is your business to leave all that you have know altogether behind you, and no man has eyes at the back of his head - go forward. — Hilaire Belloc

The old freedom sufficiently survives in the mind of the wage earner to give him the illusion that, while accepting insurance and maintenance from the capitalist state, he can still be a full citizen. He thinks he can have his cake and eat it too. He is mistaken. The great capitalists who procured these regulations from the politicians knew what they were at. They were catching their proletariat in a net, and now they hold it fast. — Hilaire Belloc

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.' — Hilaire Belloc

I am a sundial, and I make a botch Of what is done much better by a watch. — Hilaire Belloc

And the men that were boys when I was a boy Shall sit and drink with me. — Hilaire Belloc

Even if the wealth and power be well distributed throughout a community, its members will not be happy unless they are inwardly so, and obviously where the distribution is bad, where the few have a vast superfluity and the many are consumed by anxiety or want, or where a few controllers can exercise their will over the many, society has failed, even though its total wealth and power be increased. — Hilaire Belloc

We cannot make owners by merely giving men something to own. And, I repeat, whether there be sufficient desire for property left upon which we can work, only experience can decide. — Hilaire Belloc

Great artistic talent in any direction... is hardly inherent to the man. It comes and goes; it is often possessed only for a short phase in his life; it hardly ever colors his character as a whole and has nothing to do with the moral and intellectual stuff of the mind and soul. Many great artists, perhaps most great artists, have been poor fellows indeed, whom to know was to despise. — Hilaire Belloc

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. — Hilaire Belloc

I put my pencil upon the paper, doubtfully, and drew little lines, considering my theme. But I would not long hesitate in this manner, for I knew that all creation must be chaos first, and then gestures in the void before it can cast out the completed thing. — Hilaire Belloc

Matilda told such dreadful lies,It made one gasp and stretch one's eyes;Her aunt, who from her earliest youth,Had kept a strict regard for truth,Attempted to believe Matilda:The effort very nearly killed her. — Hilaire Belloc

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. — Hilaire Belloc

I always like to associate with a lot of priests because it makes me understand anti-clerical things so well. — Hilaire Belloc

The choice lies between property on the one hand and slavery, public or private, on the other. There is no third issue. — Hilaire Belloc

It is Mind which determines the change of Society, and it was because the mind at work was a Catholic mind that the slave became a serf and was on his way to becoming a peasant and a fully free man-a man free economically as well as politically. The whole spirit of the Church was for small property, and that spirit was slowly, instinctively, working for the establishment of small property throughout Christendom. — Hilaire Belloc

Economic freedom is in our eyes a good. It is among the highest of temporal goods because it is necessary to the highest life of society through the dignity of man and through the multiplicity of his action, in which multiplicity is life. Through well-divided property alone can the units of society react upon the State. Through it alone can a public opinion flourish. Only where the bulk of the cells are healthy can the whole organism thrive. — Hilaire Belloc

Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army! — Hilaire Belloc

It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation. — Hilaire Belloc

You are my cat, and I am your human. — Hilaire Belloc

When people call this beast to mind, They marvel more and more At such a little tail behind, So large a trunk before. — Hilaire Belloc

These are the advantages of travel, that one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet, and that one feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind — Hilaire Belloc

Property, as a general social institution, well-divided property, having disappeared and Capitalism having taken its place, you cannot reverse the process without acting against natural economic tendencies. — Hilaire Belloc

The larger the unit of capital present, the easier the transaction called emission of credit. Centralized lending of this kind (which is today universal) actively promotes the absorption of the small man by the great, the reduction of small property owners to a proletarian condition. — Hilaire Belloc

Oh, you should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about. — Hilaire Belloc

Wherever the Industrial system has reached its second generation it is threatened by two mortal perils. The first is the demand by an organized proletariat for sustenance without relation to the product of its labor; a demand which threatens the very existence of PROFIT (on the necessary presumption of which Capitalism reposes). The second, and immediately graver danger is that of a revolt for the confiscation of the means of production. — Hilaire Belloc

How slow the shadow creeps: but when 'tis past How fast the shadows fall. How fast! How fast! — Hilaire Belloc

There is no one who has cooked but has discovered that each particular dish depends for its rightness upon some little point which he is never told. It is not only so of cooking: it is so of splicing a rope; of painting a surface of wood; of mixing mortar; of almost anything you like to name among the immemorial human arts. — Hilaire Belloc

Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not. — Hilaire Belloc

Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty. — Hilaire Belloc

Of old when folk lay sick and sorely tried The doctors gave them physic, and they died. But here's a happier age: for now we know Both how to make men sick and keep them so. — Hilaire Belloc

The machine does not control the mind of man, though it affects the mind of man; it is the mind of man that can and should control the machine. — Hilaire Belloc

Capitalism had arisen through the misuse and exaggeration of certain rights, notably the right of property - the basis of economic freedom - and the right of contract, which is one of the main functions of economic freedom. Therefore, even under Capitalism, so long as the old principles were remembered it was possible to recall the principles whereby Society had once been sane and well ordered. — Hilaire Belloc

Kings live in Palaces, and Pigs in sties, And youth in Expectation. Youth is wise. — Hilaire Belloc

Any subject can be made interesting, and therefore any subject can be made boring. — Hilaire Belloc

Life Lessons by Hilaire Belloc

1. Hilaire Belloc taught us to live life to the fullest and to appreciate the simple things in life. He encouraged us to find joy in our everyday experiences, no matter how small.
2. He also believed in the power of kindness and compassion, and that we should strive to understand and help one another.
3. Finally, he showed us that it is possible to find beauty in the world, and that we should strive to be kind and generous to all living things.