British-French writer & historian (1870-1953)
Death ... people nowadays seem to regard as something odd, whereas it is well known to be the commonest thing in the world.
HILAIRE BELLOC
The Path to Rome
Nothing is worthwhile on this unhappy earth except the fulfilment of a man's desire.
HILAIRE BELLOC
The Four Men: A Farrago
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.
HILAIRE BELLOC
"The Shadows", On Anything
How slow the Shadow creeps: but when 'tis past,
How fast the Shadows fall. How fast! How fast!
HILAIRE BELLOC
"On a Sundial II"
Let us suffer absurdities, for this is only to suffer one another.
HILAIRE BELLOC
The Path to Rome
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.
HILAIRE BELLOC
The Path to Rome
Oh! let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about!
HILAIRE BELLOC
"The Microbe", More Beasts for Worse Children
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.
HILAIRE BELLOC
"The Shadows", On Anything
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.
HILAIRE BELLOC
Stories, Essays and Poems
I shoot the Hippopotamus
With bullets made of platinum,
Because if I use leaden ones
His hide is sure to flatten 'em.
HILAIRE BELLOC
"The Hippopotamus", The Bad Child's Book of Beasts
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.
HILAIRE BELLOC
This and That and the Other
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.
HILAIRE BELLOC
The Modern Traveller
I'm tired of Love; I'm still more tired of Rhyme.
But money gives me pleasure all the time.
HILAIRE BELLOC
"Fatigued", Sonnets and Verse
In soft deluding lies let fools delight.
A shadow marks our days, which end in Night.
HILAIRE BELLOC
"On a Sundial", Sonnets and Verse
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.
HILAIRE BELLOC
Survival and New Arrivals