Top 100 Hilaire Belloc Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.”

— Hilaire Belloc

2. “Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, There’s always laughter and good red wine. At least I’ve always found it so. Benedicamus Domino!”

— Hilaire Belloc

3. “And the men that were boys when I was a boy Shall sit and drink with me.”

— Hilaire Belloc

4. “Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not.”

— Hilaire Belloc

5. “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

6. “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

7. “Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.”

— Hilaire Belloc

8. “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

9. “Oh, you should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.”

— Hilaire Belloc

10. “I forget the name of the place; I forget the name of the girl; but the wine was Chambertin.”

— Hilaire Belloc

11. “Of courtesy, it is much less Than courage of heart or holiness, Yet in my walks it seems to me That the Grace of God is in courtesy.”

— Hilaire Belloc

12. “The Church is a perpetually defeated thing that always outlives her conquerers.”

— Hilaire Belloc

13. “You are my cat, and I am your human.”

— Hilaire Belloc

14. “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.”

— Hilaire Belloc

15. “Any subject can be made interesting, and therefore any subject can be made boring.”

— Hilaire Belloc

16. “I said to Heart, “How goes it?” Heart replied: “Right as a Ribstone Pippin!” But it lied.”

— Hilaire Belloc

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “But scientists, who ought to know Assure us that it must be so. Oh, let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about.”

— Hilaire Belloc

21. “Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight. But roaring Bill, who killed him, thought it right.”

— Hilaire Belloc

22. “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

23. “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

24. “The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.”

— Hilaire Belloc

25. “We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

— Hilaire Belloc

26. “How slow the shadow creeps: but when ’tis past How fast the shadows fall. How fast! How fast!”

— Hilaire Belloc

27. “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

28. “In soft deluding lies let fools delight. A shadow marks our days, which end in Night.”

— Hilaire Belloc

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “This our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church. Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish. The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.”

— Hilaire Belloc

35. “For one thing, I was no longer alone; a man is never alone with the wind-and the boat made three.”

— Hilaire Belloc

36. “The microbe is so very small: You cannot take him out at all.”

— Hilaire Belloc

37. “Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty.”

— Hilaire Belloc

38. “I always like to associate with a lot of priests because it makes me understand anti-clerical things so well.”

— Hilaire Belloc

39. “The choice lies between property on the one hand and slavery, public or private, on the other. There is no third issue.”

— Hilaire Belloc

40. “Be at the pains of putting down every single item of expenditure whatsoever every day which could possibly be twisted into a professional expense and remember to lump in all the doubtfulls.”

— Hilaire Belloc

41. “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

42. “Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.”

— Hilaire Belloc

43. “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

44. “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

45. “The sea drives truth into a man like salt.”

— Hilaire Belloc

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “The grace of God is courtesy.”

— Hilaire Belloc

50. “Oh, my friends, be warned by me, That breakfast, dinner, lunch and tea, Are all human frame requires.”

— Hilaire Belloc