“Another quaint and lovely fashion that English Christmas-keepers would do well to borrow is the custom of leaving the house-doors wide open just as the clock strikes midnight.”

Admiring a ritual in which hospitality becomes a symbolic act of faith · Essay, Christmas Customs, English Illustrated Magazine, 1899

• Faith
• Friendship
• Tradition

“I do most certainly believe that the Supream Magistrate hath some Power, but not all Power in matters of Religion.”

Drawing a firm boundary between political authority and religious conscience · The Rehearsal Transpros'd: The Second Part

• Faith
• Freedom
• Power

“Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.”

A brief warning against reducing life to a single final principle · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Faith
• Truth

“The Catholic Church is like a thick steak, a good cigar, and a glass of wine.”

Expressing Belloc’s characteristically earthy affection for Catholic life · Conversation, as commonly attributed

• Faith
• Joy

“Mary and her Son may enter in and bless the merry companies.”

Expressing the devotional meaning underlying a traditional midnight custom · Essay, Christmas Customs, English Illustrated Magazine, 1899

• Faith
• Joy

“The very idea of a bridge, of course, is a form peculiarly dependent on such spiritual convictions. It is an act of faith besides being a communication.”

Defining the bridge as both connection and an emblem of spiritual belief · Letter to Waldo Frank, 20 June 1926

• Art
• Faith

“Art is essentially a conquest of matter by the spirit.”

Expressing art as the transformation of material into spiritual form. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Art
• Faith

“I find that the moral excellence which religion demands is the highest guarantee of philosophical success.”

Linking moral discipline with intellectual clarity and philosophical achievement · Notes of an Address to Medical Students, 1856

• Faith
• Truth

“Come what will I am in Better Hands than either yours or my own; I desire to realize and to rest in this.”

Her response to grave illness centres on trust rather than control · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 20 May 1892

• Faith
• Hope
• Mortality

“We are all one in the spirit.”

Expresses a vision of spiritual unity beneath individual difference · The Candle of Vision

• Faith
• Truth

“It is also not consistent with the reality of the soul to admit that there is anything in the known universe more divine than men and women.”

Placing human dignity at the centre of spiritual value · Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855

• Faith
• Truth

“God is the country of the spirit, and each of us is given a little holding of ground in that country.”

Using the language of landscape to describe an intensely personal conception of the spiritual life · Letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson

• Faith
• Nature

“God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly—not one.”

Presenting contrasting experiences as a means of spiritual growth · Fihi ma fihi (prose discourse; translation varies)

• Faith
• Hope

“The soul of man will not with such only—nay, not with such at all—be finally satisfied.”

Insisting that material achievement alone cannot satisfy human beings · Essay, Democratic Vistas

• Faith
• Truth

“New conditions of life germinate new forms of spiritual articulation.”

Suggesting that changing experience naturally creates new forms of expression · General Aims and Theories, 1925

• Art
• Faith
• Time

“The poet is the priest of the invisible.”

Presenting poetry as a spiritual practice that gives form to what cannot be seen · Adagia, published in Opus Posthumous

• Faith
• Poetry

“He ought to be worshipped.”

Expressing religious duty as a universal obligation · Treatise on natural religion, De Veritate

• Faith

“All men are led to Heaven by their own loves; but these must first be sacrificed.”

Expressing Patmore's recurring belief that love must be transformed rather than extinguished · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta CVI

• Faith
• Love

“I am a great believer in new light, but let us always remember that the source of light is the same, and keep our eyes open to see it growing brighter and brighter until noon.”

Original: Yr wyf fi yn gredwr mawr mewn goleuni newydd, ond dewch i ni gael cofio o hyd, mai yr un yw ffynhonnell goleuni, a chadw'n llygaid yn agored i'w weled yn myned fwy—fwy hyd hanner dydd. — Welcoming new understanding while retaining a sense of an enduring spiritual source · Sermon, Sul y Blodau, 31 March 1903 (Welsh)

• Faith
• Hope
• Truth

“Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.”

Finding hope in childhood and in humanity’s continuing possibility of renewal · Prose aphorism, Stray Birds

• Childhood
• Faith
• Hope

“Variety of translations is profitable for the finding out of the sense of the Scriptures.”

Presenting different renderings as a resource for understanding · Preface, The Translators to the Reader (1611)

• Faith
• Truth

“Creation differs from subsistence only as the first leap of a fountain differs from its continuance.”

Using a vivid natural image to portray creation as a continuously sustained act · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta LII

• Faith
• Nature

“As if for the first time, indeed, creation noiselessly sank into and through me its placid and untellable lesson.”

Presenting contemplation as a wordless lesson received from creation · Specimen Days, Hours for the Soul

• Faith
• Nature

“It is indeed true that I never feel so comforted, as when I feel humbled, and experience a deep sense of my own sinfulness.”

Describing the paradoxical consolation she found in spiritual humility · Letter to Elizabeth Fry, January 1824

• Faith