British-French writer & historian (1870-1953)
It is easier to command a lapdog or a mule for a whole day than one's own fate for half-an-hour.
HILAIRE BELLOC
The Path to Rome
The sun, in a single moment and with the immediate summons of a trumpet-call, strikes the spear-head of the high places, and at once the valley, though still in shadow, is transfigured, and with the daylight all manner of things have come back to the world.
HILAIRE BELLOC
"On Sacramental Things", At the Sign of the Lion
Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.
HILAIRE BELLOC
"On Books", The Silence Of The Sea and Other Essays
It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation.
HILAIRE BELLOC
letter to G.K. Chesterton, December 12, 1917
When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside which is like the cold of space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.
HILAIRE BELLOC
The Four Men: A Farrago
It annoys the fairies very much to think that people are stopping believing in them. They are very proud people, and think a lot of themselves. They can, if they like, do us good, and they think us ungrateful when we forget about them. Sometimes in the past people have gone on forgetting about fairies more and more and more, until at last they have stopped believing in them altogether. The fairies meanwhile have been looking after their own affairs, and it is their fault more than ours when we forget about them. But when this has gone on for too long a time the fairies wake up and find out by a way they have that men have stopped believing in them, and get very much annoyed. Then some fairy proposes that a map of the way to Fairyland should be drawn up and given to the people; but this is always voted down; and at last they make up their minds to wake people up to Fairyland by going and visiting this world, and by spells bringing several people into their kingdom and so getting witnesses. For, as you can imagine, it is a most unpleasant thing to be really important and for other people not to know it.
HILAIRE BELLOC
"The Way to Fairyland", On Something
We humans make all that present which is never there, and which is always hurrying past us like the tumble of a stream, an all-important thing.
HILAIRE BELLOC
"The Shadows", On Anything
It is a consolation to remember that corruption pushed beyond a certain point provides its own remedy, and that this sort of thing cannot indefinitely continue; but it is less consoling to remember another truth, to wit, that the correction of political and social evil may come in the form of irremediable catastrophe, and that the innocent, who are the greater number, would then suffer most. It is still less consoling to remember the universal human experience that when evil is redressed by the only partly conscious force of reaction, it is not succeeded by a corresponding good, but by some other new and unexpected evil.
HILAIRE BELLOC
The Cruise of the 'Nona'
It is in the irony of Providence that the more man comes to control the material world about him, the more does he lose control over the effects of his action; and it is when he is remaking the world most speedily that he knows least whither he is driving.
HILAIRE BELLOC
The Cruise of the 'Nona'
From the towns all Inns have been driven: from the villages most.... Change your hearts or you will lose your Inns and you will deserve to have lost them. But when you have lost your Inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.
HILAIRE BELLOC
This and That
Kings live in Palaces, and Pigs in sties,
And youth in Expectation. Youth is wise.
HILAIRE BELLOC
"Habitations", Sonnets and Verses
It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them.
HILAIRE BELLOC
On Everything
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. Is it not wonderful, then, that we should be so sensitive upon the discovery of a fault which must of necessity be common to all, and that in its highest degree?
HILAIRE BELLOC
"On Ignorance", On Nothing & Kindred Subjects
Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.
HILAIRE BELLOC
"On Statistics", The Silence Of The Sea and Other Essays
It is solely by believing himself a creature but little lower than the cherubim that man has by interminable small degrees become, upon the whole, distinctly superior to the chimpanzee.
HILAIRE BELLOC
Modern Essays
"You must first understand," said I, "where Fairyland is: it lies a little way farther than the farthest hill you can see. It lies, in fact, just beyond that hill. The frontiers of it are sometimes a little doubtful in any landscape, because the landscape is confused, but if on the extreme limits of the horizon you see a long line of hills bounding your view exactly, then you may be perfectly certain that on the other side of those hills is Fairyland. There are times of the day and of the weather when the sky over Fairyland can be clearly perceived, for it has a different colour from any other kind of sky. That is where Fairyland is. It is not on an island, as some have pretended, still less is it under the earth--a ridiculous story, for there it is all dark."
HILAIRE BELLOC
"The Way to Fairyland", On Something
Your life is like a little flute complaining
A long way off, beyond the willow trees:
A long way off, and nothing left remaining
But memory of a music on the breeze.
HILAIRE BELLOC
Sonnets
Loss and possession, death and life are one,
There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.
HILAIRE BELLOC
The Verse of Hilaire Belloc
Even where the Faith is preserved men pursue wealth and power inordinately. Where the Faith is lost they pursue nothing else.
HILAIRE BELLOC
Survival and New Arrivals
Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.
HILAIRE BELLOC
"Epitaph on the Politician Himself"