Top 100 Hilaire Belloc Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I shoot the Hippopotamus with bullets made of platinum, because if I use the leaden one his hide is sure to flatten em.”

— Hilaire Belloc

52. “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.”

— Hilaire Belloc

53. “Do not, I beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces already in dissolution. You have mistaken the hour of the night; it is already morning.”

— Hilaire Belloc

54. “Remote and ineffectual don.”

— Hilaire Belloc

55. “Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!”

— Hilaire Belloc

56. “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

57. “A Catholic culture does not mean or imply universality. A nation or a whole civilization is of the Catholic culture not when it is entirely composed of strong believers minutely practicing their religion, nor even whit it boasts a majority of such, but when it presents a determining number of units-family institutions, individuals, inspired by and tenacious of the Catholic spirit.”

— Hilaire Belloc

58. “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

59. “It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them.”

— Hilaire Belloc

60. “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

61. “When well-divided property has disappeared and Capitalism has taken its place, you cannot reverse the process without acting against natural economic tendencies.”

— Hilaire Belloc

62. “The Reformation has been called in a biting epigram “a rising of the rich against the poor.””

— Hilaire Belloc

63. “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

64. “It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation.”

— Hilaire Belloc

65. “Kings live in Palaces, and Pigs in sties, And youth in Expectation. Youth is wise.”

— Hilaire Belloc

66. “Like most modern words, “Heresy” is used both vaguely and diversely. It is used vaguely because the modern mind is as averse to precision in ideas as it is enamored of precision in measurement. It is used diversely because, according to the man who uses it, it may represent any one of fifty things.”

— Hilaire Belloc

67. “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

68. “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

69. “Child! do not throw this book about Refrain from the unholy pleasure Of cutting all the pictures out! Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.”

— Hilaire Belloc

70. “The whole art of the political speech is to put ‘nothing’ into it. It is much more difficult than it sounds.”

— Hilaire Belloc

71. “Be content to remember that those who can make omelettes properly can do nothing else.”

— Hilaire Belloc

72. “All men have an instinct for conflict: at least, all healthy men.”

— Hilaire Belloc

73. “Money gives me pleasure all the time.”

— Hilaire Belloc

74. “What is needed is a form of tax which not only spares the small man at the expense of his wealthier rival, but actually subsidizes the small man where subsidy is necessary.”

— Hilaire Belloc

75. “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

76. “For one’s native place is the shell of one’s soul, and one’s church is the kernel of that nut.”

— Hilaire Belloc

77. “There is and always has been the Church, and various heresies proceeding from a rejection of some of the Church’s doctrines by men who still desire to retain the rest of her teaching and morals.”

— Hilaire Belloc

78. “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

79. “I say the word ” Anti-Semite” is vulgar and pedantic : that I think will be universally admitted. It is also nonsensical. The antagonism to the Jews has nothing to do with any supposed “Semitic” race which probably does not exist any more than do many other modern hypothetical abstractions, and which, anyhow, does not come into the matter. The Anti-Semite is not a man who hates the modern Arabs or the ancient Carthaginians. He is a man who hates Jews.”

— Hilaire Belloc

80. “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

81. “Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, there’s always laughter and good red wine.”

— Hilaire Belloc

82. “The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, with an indolent expression and an undulating throat; like an unsuccessful literary man.”

— Hilaire Belloc

83. “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

84. “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

85. “The moment a man talks to his fellows he begins to lie.”

— Hilaire Belloc

86. “The power of the State must be invoked for restoring economic freedom just as it has been invoked for destroying economic freedom.”

— Hilaire Belloc

87. “If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.”

— Hilaire Belloc

88. “A man going uphill may be at the same level as another man going down hill; but they are facing different ways and have different destinies. Our world, passing out of the old Paganism of Greece and Rome towards the consummation of Christendom and a Catholic civilization from which we all derive, is the very negation of the same world leaving the light of its ancestral religion and sliding back into the dark.”

— Hilaire Belloc

89. “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

90. “There is thus a very great deal in common between the enthusiasm with which Mohammed’s teaching attacked the priesthood, the Mass and the sacraments, and the enthusiasm with which Calvinism, the central motive force of the Reformation, did the same.”

— Hilaire Belloc

91. “Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.”

— Hilaire Belloc

92. “There was a shepherd the other day up at Findon Fair who had come from the east by Lewes with sheep, and who had in his eyes that reminiscence of horizons which makes the eyes of shepherds and of mountaineers different from the eyes of other men.”

— Hilaire Belloc

93. “Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny.”

— Hilaire Belloc

94. “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

95. “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

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

— Hilaire Belloc

97. “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

98. “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

99. “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

100. “Protest against Industrial Capitalism from one aspect or another is universal: so was the protest against the condition of European religion at the beginning of the sixteenth century.”

— Hilaire Belloc