Hilaire Belloc

Date of Birth:

27-Jul-1870

Nationality:

United States

Profession:

Poet

Born near Paris, France, on July 27, 1870, Hilaire Belloc grew up in England, but remained a French citizen until 1902. His father, Louis Belloc, was a respected French lawyer and his mother, Elizabeth Rayner Parkes, was well-known in English literary circles. Belloc attended Cardinal Newman's Preparatory School, where he was greatly influenced by strong Catholic education and had a background in classics and history studies. In 1892, Belloc left school for one year to join the French Artillery Service in France. After this, he returned to England and continued his studies at Baillol College, Oxford. An enthusiastic and visionary student, Belloc is said to have intensified long conversations with his peers while actively working on his history lessons. Belloc was also a successful historian and historian, publishing the Elections of Mr. Clutterbuck (1908), A Change in the Cabinet (1909), Pongo and the Bull (1910), The French Revolution (1911), and History of England (1915 ). During World War I, he worked for the War Propaganda Bureau and was a foreign correspondent for the West. He was a staunch supporter of British involvement in the war, but lost many friends and his son in the war. After the war, Belloc (a devout Roman Catholic) wrote a series of historical books and religious writings. In 1942 he suffered a stroke, which left him paralyzed for eleven years, until his death on July 16, 1953.

AUTHOR DETAILS

Hilaire Belloc

Books by Hilaire Belloc

QUOTES BY Hilaire Belloc

The Church is a perpetually defeated thing that always outlives her conquerers.

Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not.

The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, with an indolent expression and an undulating throat; like an unsuccessful literary man.

Oh, you should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.

Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!

When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside world which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.

If we are to be happy, decent and secure of our souls: drink some kind of fermented liquor with one's food; go on the water from time to time; dance on occasions, and sing in a chorus...

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

For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man.

Do not, I beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces already in dissolution. You have mistaken the hour of the night; it is already morning.

The prospect of refreshment at the charges of another is an opportunity never to be neglected by men of clear commercial judgment.