All Quotes

"All teaching is dogmatic. Dogma, indeed, means only "a thing taught," and teaching not dogmatic would cease to be teaching and would become discussion and doubt."

"Logically the Neo-Pagan should get rid of the institution of marriage altogether; but the very nature of human society, which is built up of cells each of which is a family, and the very nature of human generation, forbid such an extreme. Children must be brought up and acknowledged and sheltered, and the very nature of human affection, whereby there is the bond of affection between the parent and the child, and the child is not of one parent but of both, will compel the Neo-Pagan to modify what might be his logical conclusion of free love and support some simulacrum of the institution of marriage."

"[I]n words lie the seeds of all dissension, and love at its most profound is silent."

"Be content to remember that those who can make omelettes properly can do nothing else."

"Any subject can be made interesting, and therefore any subject can be made boring."

"To exalt, enthrone, establish and defend, To welcome home mankind's mysterious friend Wine, true begetter of all arts that be; Wine, privilege of the completely free; Wine the recorder; wine the sagely strong; Wine, bright avenger of sly-dealing wrong, Awake, Ausonian Muse, and sing the vineyard song!"

"By thee do seers the inward light discern; By thee the statue lives, the Gods return."

"When the ephemeral vision's lure is past All, all, must face their Passion at the last."

"So touch my dying lip: so bridge that deep: So pledge my waking from the gift of sleep, And, sacramental, raise me the Divine: Strong brother in God and last companion, Wine."

"That I grow sour, who only lack delight; That I descend to sneer, who only grieve: That from my depth I should contemn your height; That with my blame my mockery you receive; Huntress and splendour of the woodland night, Diana of this world, do not believe."

"Torture will give a dozen pence or more To keep a drab from bawling at his door. The public taste is quite a different thing— Torture is positively paid to sing."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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)."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"Being a writer in a library [...] is rather like being a eunuch in a harem."

"There has to be a woman, but not much of a one. A good horse is much more important."

"If we would despise the enemy, our thoughts must always be of God and our souls always glad with hope."

"To one whose mind is sound, letters are needless."

"To those who have an active belief, reasoned proofs are needless and probably useless."

"I am going the way of my fathers, as the Scripture says, for I see myself called by the Lord. Be you wary and undo not your long service of God, but be earnest to keep your strong purpose, as though you were but now beginning. You know the demons who plot against you, you know how savage they are and how powerless; therefore, fear them not. Let Christ be as the breath you breathe; in Him put your trust. Live as dying daily, heeding yourselves and remembering the counsels you have heard from me. … So do you also be earnest always to be in union first with the Lord and then with the Saints, that after death, they also may receive you into everlasting tabernacles as known friends. Ponder these things, and mean them. … And now God save you, children, for Antony departs and is with you no more."

"Whoever hammers a lump of iron, first decides what he is going to make of it, a scythe, a sword, or an axe. Even so we ought to make up our minds what kind of virtue we want to forge or we labour in vain."

"He also said: “Just as fish die if they are on dry land for some time, so do monks who loiter outside their cells or waste time with worldlings release themselves from the tension of hesychia. So we should hasten back to the cell (like the fish to the sea) lest while loitering outside we forget to keep a watch on the inner self.”"

"Abba Antony said: “A time is coming when people will rave, and when they see somebody who is not raving, they will attack him, saying: ‘You are raving [mad]’; for he is not like them.”"

"The same [elder] said: “Always have the fear of God before your eyes. Remember him who gives death and life. Hate the world and all that is in it. Hate all physical repose. Renounce this life so you may live for God. Remember what you promised to God, for he will be looking for it from you on the Day of Judgment. Be hungry and thirsty, endure nakedness, keep watch; sorrow, weep, and groan in your hearts. Examine whether you are worthy of God. Despise the flesh in order to save your souls.”"

"What you have to watch out for are the theories that claim to be infallible. Because the only way their believers can win is to stomp out everyone who disagrees with them."

"Abba Antony said: “He who is hammering a piece of iron first takes note in his logismos what he is going to make: a scythe, a sword, or an axe. So ought we to consider what kind of virtue we are seeking, so that we do not labor in vain.”"

"As soon as this earth's great elder, the blessed Antony, who prayed for the whole world, departed, everything has been torn apart and is in anguish, and the Wrath devastates Egypt. While he was truly on earth, he extended his hands and prayed and spoke with God all day long. He did not let the Wrath descend on us. Lifting up his thoughts, he kept it from coming down. But now that those hands are closed, no one else can be found who might halt the violence of the Wrath that may devastate the whole region. I write to you therefore because the churches are filled with desolation, and the city streets are filled with blasphemies. Many crimes, fornication, all sorts of filth fill our city. The source of the corruption: the mad minds of the Arians. The Church of God has no ministers, the sanctuaries stand deserted. People have left the churches deserted, empty."

"The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires."

"[...] the Christian idea of man “made in the image and likeness of God” has created, on a political level, a tension that runs through the entire history of the West. It is, in fact, an ideal which, despite compromising and even murky vicissitudes, between ‘theocratic’ temptations and ‘satanocratic’ rejections of political power, has exerted, throughout history, a sometimes overwhelming pressure on its antithetical worldly element. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's”: with this, the principle that Káysar is not Kýrios entered history – political power was desacralised, the worldly order relativised, and Caesar's demands subjected to a judgement of legitimacy by an inviolable conscience. On this basis, Origen could justify, against Celsus, the refusal of Christians to associate themselves with the cult of the emperor or to refuse to kill in obedience to his orders."

"It has become a settled principle that nothing which is good and true can be destroyed by persecution, but that the effect ultimately is to establish more firmly, and to spread more widely, that which it was designed to overthrow. It has long since passed into a proverb that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.""

"There can be no Good Will. Will is always Evil; it is persecution to others or selfishness."

"If a Texas surgeon who rightfully blew the whistle on a child-mutilation program his state outlawed can face politically charged persecution laden with misconduct simply because the Biden administration wants to make a point about people who oppose its radical transgender agenda, no one is safe."

"Christianity has made martyrdom sublime, and sorrow triumphant."

"If you ask someone whether our Constitutional rights are being flushed down the porcelain oubliette, and their response is, "If I answer that honestly they'll arrest me," then you already have your answer."

"Come on, you apes! You wanta live forever?"

"That old saw about "to understand all is to forgive all" is a lot of tripe. Some things, the more you understand the more you loathe them."

"Polyglot, polymath and mythomane."