Quotes from Hilaire Belloc

We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.

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.

The sea drives truth into a man like salt.

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

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

Life is a veil, its paths are dark and rough Only because we do not know enough When Science has discovered something more We shall be happier than we were before.

The prospect of refreshment at the charges of another is an opportunity never to be neglected by men of clear commercial judgment.

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.

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

A strong Protectionist, believes In everything but Heaven. For entertainment, dines, receives, Unmarried, 57.

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.

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.

The Modern Attack will not tolerate us. It will attempt to destroy us. Nor can we tolerate it. We must attempt to destroy it as being the fully equipped and ardent enemy of the Truth by which men live. The duel is to the death.

Timeo hominem unius mulieris. (''A man who keeps to one woman is formidable.'')

For one's native place is the shell of one's soul, and one's church is the kernel of that nut.

An effort was made to spread this new materialist atheism with its Communist consequence by the sword (as the metaphor goes), that is, by the invasion of neighboring countries with consequent further massacres and the extension of the area of despotic Soviet control... This armed attempt at expansion was checked by Catholic Poland, the most immediately exposed victim, in what has been called one of the decisive battles of the world.

los bárbaros construyen sus casas separadas, y los hombres civilizados, juntas.

This is what seems to me the grave, perhaps the gravest, evil of our time. For history is always somewhat false, and by its falsehood always somewhat warps judgment; but history written on the basis of deliberate falsehood and of repeated and prolonged suppression would be another matter altogether. It would not be history at all. Now history is the memory of the race; and a man without memory is no longer a man.

Upon being asked by a Reader whether the verses contained in this book were true.   And is it True? It is not True. And if it were it wouldn't do, For people such as me and you Who pretty nearly all day long Are doing something rather wrong. Because if things were really so, You would have perished long ago, And I would not have lived to write The noble lines that meet your sight, Nor B. T. B. survived to draw The nicest things you ever saw. H. B.

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.

Is there any reward? I'm beginning to doubt it. I am broken and bored, Is there any reward? Reassure me, Good Lord, And inform me about it. Is there any reward? I'm beginning to doubt it.

Christian Europe should be by nature one; but it has forgotten its nature in forgetting its religion.

Either we of the faith shall become a small persecuted, neglected island amid mankind, or we shall be able to life up at the end of the struggle the old battle cry, "Christus Imperat!

For there enters an element of Comedy (in the full sense of that great word) whenever we watch the death or passing of a human mood which had thought itself absolute and eternal. There is a high comedy in discovering new moods still timid or struggling, which will in their turn affirm themselves to be indestructible, and in their turn will die. To this comic interest is added another of a very practical kind: forewarned is forearmed.