Some Belloc
All from The Path to Rome:
“[I]f there is difficulty it is in the whole launching of a thing, in the first ten pages of a book, or the first half-hour of listening to a sermon, or the first mile of a walk.”
“I will tell you this much; it is the moment (not the year or the month, mind you, nor even the hour, but the very second) when a man is grown up, when he sees things as they are (that is, backwards), and feels solidly himself. Do I make myself clear? No matter, it is the Shock of Maturity, and that must suffice for you.”
“[W]hat men love is never money itself but their own way.”
“It is quite clear that the body must be recognized and the soul kept in its place, since a little refreshing food and drink can do so much to make a man.”
“[S]o I offered them a pull of my wine, which, to my great joy, they refused, and we parted courteously.”
“Those great men Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him, drank beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread.”
The “best of all Christian associations [is] a large village.”
While reading Tacitus, Belloc says he found “this excellent truth, that barbarians build their houses separate, but civilized men together.”
“I notice that those whom the devil has made his own are always spick and span, just as firemen who have to go into great furnaces have to keep their gear highly polished."
