Quotes from belloc hilaire iii

I shoot the Hippopotamus With bullets made of platinum, Because if I use leaden ones His hide is sure to flatten 'em.

Death ... people nowadays seem to regard as something odd, whereas it is well known to be the commonest thing in the world.

Oh! let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about!

One sees so many kinds of men, one finds about one the relics of so many philosophies, one is astonished to meet, still surviving, so many illusions.

Let us suffer absurdities, for this is only to suffer one another.

It is always in a time when one's attention is at the sharpest strain, when innumerable details are separately and clearly grasped by the mind, and, in a word, when the external circumstance of life is most real to us that the comic contrast between ourselves and the greatness outside us can best be appreciated.

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 creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.

Nothing is worthwhile on this unhappy earth except the fulfilment of a man's desire.

The object of a religion or a philosophy is not to make men wealthy or powerful, but to make them, in the last issue, happy: that is, to fulfil their being.

Indeed, the whole question of fear is beyond analysis, and there is only one rule, which is, that a man must try to be so much the master of himself that he shall be able to compel himself to do whatever is needful, fear or no fear.

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

Oh, blessed quality of books, that makes them a refuge from living! For in a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and eternal.