210 Quotes by Hilaire Belloc

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

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

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.

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.

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

The Rich arrived in pairs And also in Rolls Royces; They talked of their affairs In loud and strident voices... The Poor arrived in Fords, Whose features they resembled; They laughed to see so many Lords And Ladies all assembled. The People in Between Looked underdone and harassed, And our of place and mean, And Horribly embarrassed.

Great artistic talent in any direction... is hardly inherent to the man. It comes and goes; it is often possessed only for a short phase in his life; it hardly ever colors his character as a whole and has nothing to do with the moral and intellectual stuff of the mind and soul. Many great artists, perhaps most great artists, have been poor fellows indeed, whom to know was to despise.

There is no one who has cooked but has discovered that each particular dish depends for its rightness upon some little point which he is never told. It is not only so of cooking: it is so of splicing a rope; of painting a surface of wood; of mixing mortar; of almost anything you like to name among the immemorial human arts.

Money gives me pleasure all the time.