Children S Authors

"For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds."

"Diamond, however, had not been out so late before in all his life, and things looked so strange about him! — just as if he had got into Fairyland, of which he knew quite as much as anybody; for his mother had no money to buy books to set him wrong on the subject."

"Where did you come from baby dear? Out of the everywhere into the here.... Where did you get your eyes so blue? Out of the skies as I came through."

"We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments....Each, putting his foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine how far his neighbor’s footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the Master’s, although it is but his own."

"It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice."

"A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint."

"...the regions where there is only life, and therefore all that is not music is silence."

"The man that feareth, Lord, to doubt, In that fear doubteth thee."

"You would not think any duty small, If you yourself were great."

"We must do the thing we must Before the thing we may; We are unfit for any trust Till we can and do obey."

"I knew now, that it is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, and not the being loved by each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness. I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over any soul beloved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit; a power that cannot be but for good; for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies. Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return. All true love will, one day, behold its own image in the eyes of the beloved, and be humbly glad. This is possible in the realms of lofty Death."

"It is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood."

"Thou goest thine, and I go mine — Many ways we wend; Many days, and many ways, Ending in one end. Many a wrong, and its curing song; Many a road, and many an inn; Room to roam, but only one home For all the world to win."

"Endurance must conquer, where force could not reach."

"Benefits conferred awaken love in some minds, as surely as benefits received in others."

"All that man sees has to do with man. Worlds cannot be without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of all creation suggests an interradiating connection and dependence of the parts. Else a grander idea is conceivable than that which is already embodied."

"There is no cheating in nature and the simple unsought feelings of the soul. There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning."

"Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call the reality? — not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier?"

"So, then, as darkness had no beginning, neither will it ever have an end. So, then, is it eternal. The negation of aught else, is its affirmation. Where the light cannot come, there abideth the darkness. The light doth but hollow a mine out of the infinite extension of the darkness. And ever upon the steps of the light treadeth the darkness; yea, springeth in fountains and wells amidst it, from the secret channels of its mighty sea. Truly, man is but a passing flame, moving unquietly amid the surrounding rest of night; without which he yet could not be, and whereof he is in part compounded."

"Afterwards I learned, that the best way to manage some kinds of painful thoughts, is to dare them to do their worst; to let them lie and gnaw at your heart till they are tired; and you find you still have a residue of life they cannot kill."

"But tell me how it is that she could be so beautiful without any heart at all — without any place even for a heart to live in." "I cannot quite tell," she said; "but I am sure she would not look so beautiful if she did not take means to make herself look more beautiful than she is. And then, you know, you began by being in love with her before you saw her beauty … But the chief thing that makes her beautiful is this: that, although she loves no man, she loves the love of any man; and when she finds one in her power, her desire to bewitch him and gain his love (not for the sake of his love either, but that she may be conscious anew of her own beauty, through the admiration he manifests), makes her very lovely—with a self-destructive beauty..."

"What distressed me most — more even than my own folly — was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?"

"That is always the way with you men; you believe nothing the first time; and it is foolish enough to let mere repetition convince you of what you consider in itself unbelievable."

"What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good."

"Alas! how easily things go wrong! A sigh too deep or a kiss too long, And then comes a mist and a weeping rain, And life is never the same again."

"I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word doctrine, as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory. I preached a sermon about this. We are far too anxious to be definite and to have finished, well-polished, sharp-edged systems — forgetting that the more perfect a theory about the infinite, the surer it is to be wrong, the more impossible it is to be right."

"If sin must be kept alive, then hell must be kept alive; but while I regard the smallest sin as infinitely loathsome, I do not believe that any being, never good enough to see the essential ugliness of sin, could sin so as to deserve such punishment. I am not now, however, dealing with the question of the duration of punishment, but with the idea of punishment itself; and would only say in passing, that the notion that a creature born imperfect, nay, born with impulses to evil not of his own generating, and which he could not help having, a creature to whom the true face of God was never presented, and by whom it never could have been seen, should be thus condemned, is as loathsome a lie against God as could find place in heart too undeveloped to understand what justice is, and too low to look up into the face of Jesus."

"I record the conviction that in one way or another, special individual help is given to every creature to endure to the end. It has been my own experience, that always when suffering, whether mental or bodily, approached the point where further endurance appeared impossible, the pulse of it began to ebb and a lull ensued. You are tender-hearted, and you want to be true, and are trying to be; learn these two things: Never be discouraged because good things get on so slowly here; and never fail daily to do that good which lies next to your hand. Do not be in a hurry, but be diligent. Enter into the sublime patience of the Lord. Trust to God to weave your little thread into the great web, though the pattern shows it not yet. When God's people are able and willing thus to labor and wait, remember that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day; the grand harvest of the ages shall come to its reaping, and the day shall broaden itself to a thousand years, and the thousand years shall show themselves as a perfect and finished day."

""In the midst of life we are in death," said one; it is more true that in the midst of death we are in life. Life is the only reality; what men call death is but a shadow — a word for that which cannot be — a negation, owing the very idea of itself to that which it would deny. But for life there could be no death. If God were not, there would not even be nothing. Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence."

"Two people may be at the same spot in manners and behaviour, and yet one may be getting better, and the other worse, which is the greatest of differences that could possibly exist between them."

"To receive honestly is the best thanks for a good thing."

"I think the reason children get tired of their toys so soon is just that it is against human nature to be really interested in what is of no use. If you say that a beautiful thing is always interesting, I answer, that a beautiful thing is of the highest use. Is not the diamond that flashes all its colours into the heart of a poet as useful as the diamond with which the glazier divides the sheets of glass into panes for our windows?"

"It is a consolation to remember that corruption pushed beyond a certain point provides its own remedy, and that this sort of thing cannot indefinitely continue; but it is less consoling to remember another truth, to wit, that the correction of political and social evil may come in the form of irremediable catastrophe, and that the innocent, who are the greater number, would then suffer most. It is still less consoling to remember the universal human experience that when evil is redressed by the only partly conscious force of reaction, it is not succeeded by a corresponding good, but by some other new and unexpected evil."

"Had he chosen to devote himself wholly to letters during that decade, his reputation would, perhaps, be more solid today. For there can be no question at all that Belloc was one of the finest prose-writers of the century; one of the most distinctive minor poets and the most accomplished practitioner of ‘light’ or ‘comic’ verse. He is out of fashion, out of print, in most cases out of mind, not because of the quality of his literary output, but, very largely, because of the nature of his political and religious beliefs. He regarded politics as far too important a matter to be taken wholly seriously. He was rewarded by not being taken seriously himself. Although we can now see that many of his political judgements were right, that was not to prevent him being a complete political failure. Being in the right is not infrequently the unforgivable sin in politics. He began as a republican. He ended as an authoritarian monarchist. At no stage did he have any noticeable sympathy with parliamentary institutions. This angered people. He regarded ‘the party system’ as humbug, and said so."

"Between Lord Lundy and the Dodo, Belloc's genius as a light versifier stands unchallenged after half a century. The English find it hard to believe that a master of light verse can also be a serious poet. Nevertheless, a serious poet he was, and the master of a warmth and range which at their best even excel most of his work in prose. In fine, if he left no single masterpiece except, perhaps, the Cautionary Tales and their parallel volumes, if even The Path to Rome and the collected essays are too discursive to rank with the unimpeachable books of their period, it is impossible to withhold a pre-eminent place among the masters of the twentieth century to a writer who resumed in his single person the high spirits of Mr. Evelyn Waugh at his best, the political vigour of a Mallock, the satire of Mr. Maugham, a forthright, fresh and lively style in all his many-sided prose, and a lyrical note rarely heard since the close of the century before."

"I suppose that if you asked a hundred people who knew him, what struck them most about him they would answer: "His physical and intellectual vitality.""

"His wit was French, but his humour English. He was profoundly moved by the beauty of English landscape, but preferred the French way of living. His military temper, his love of justice rather than order, the logical processes of his thought were French. At sea he was English, but Irish in that recurring dream of a landfall which is not of this world. Some have called him, for his hearty pugnacity, a figure as English as Cobbett. Others have emphasized his many un-English qualities. In appearance he seemed to be an Englishman dressed as a Frenchman."

"Beyond those deservedly famous, witty cautionary verses, Belloc's reputation has not survived. His views were unpopular: he was Roman Catholic of the continental tradition, anti-Jew, and a trenchant critic of Parliament despite sitting as a MP for South Salford. And in his craft, although a prolific writer, he was careless. Many books were dictated, and though full of inspired passages, were patchy and repetitive; perhaps they should be declaimed. His book on Milton...was dictated over the space of ten days in his study at Kingsland, his Sussex home... It is precisely the unevenness of Belloc's work which confines him to the lower Parnassian slopes."

"Finally, and indeed from beginning to end, there is his Catholicism: the heart of his preposterousness. Obviously, one might say, Englishmen cannot ultimately be anything but foggy Anglicans—anything else will not really do. One might recall how Belloc wound himself in indignant knots summoning up ideas of Catholic Christendom which were already centuries out of date when Voltaire attacked them (Europe and The Faith). Or how he convinced himself that English roofs nestling together meant barbarity, while a long straight row of French houses along a paved round meant civilization (The Path to Rome)."

"In his history, theoretically the most objective genre, he is like a wonderful quick-change artist, for beneath the period paint of each protagonist we see the familiar square features: the hidden reliance of Cromwell the campaigner on his family life; the uplifting physical presence of Danton in the tumbril on the way to the guillotine."

"I don't know if I told you, that in Rome Hilaire Belloc turned up (a wonderful old man!) ... He is a very great writer and with Maurras and Daudet in France, and his friend Chesterton, they have all been forerunners of the Right movement. He thinks I have done a really good thing with Flowering Rifle, and that my other work will not even count beside it in the long run. His word is worth more than the whole of Fleet Street."

"The moment a man talks to his fellows he begins to lie."

"All men have an instinct for conflict: at least, all healthy men."

"Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death."

"Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing."

"The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam."

"Kings live in Palaces, and Pigs in sties, And youth in Expectation. Youth is wise."

"Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight, But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right."

"Loss and Possession, Death and Life are one. There falls no shadow where there shines no sun."

"How slow the Shadow creeps: but when 'tis past, How fast the Shadows fall. How fast! How fast!"