Top 100 Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes
#1. All conscious thought is a process in time; so that to think consciously about Time is like trying to use a foot-rule to measure its own length.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#2. What? Sunday morning in an English family and no sausages? God bless my soul, what's the world coming to, eh?
Dorothy L. Sayers
#3. He had the appeal of a very young dog of a very large breed
a kind of amiable absurdity.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#4. This is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity ... You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#5. My husband would do anything for me ... ' It's degrading. No human being ought to have such power over another."
"It's a very real power, Harriet."
"Then ... we won't use it. If we disagree, we'll fight it out like gentlemen. We won't stand for matrimonial blackmail.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#6. So I am a Socialist," said Ingleby, "but I can't stand this stuff about Old Dumbletonians. If everybody had the same State education, these things wouldn't happen." "If everybody had the same face," said Bredon, "there'd be no pretty women.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#7. The business of the artist is not to escape from his material medium or bully it, but to serve it; but to serve it, he must love it. If he does so, he will realise that in its service is perfect freedom.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#9. If men will not understand the meaning of judgement, they will never come to understand the meaning of grace.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#10. The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#11. What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?
Dorothy L. Sayers
#13. I often think when a man's once past a certain age, the older he grows the tougher he gets, and women the same or more so.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#14. Mr. Copley, feeling as though his head were filled with hard knobs of spinning granite that crashed with sickening thuds against his brainpan, walked stiffly away to his own quarters. As
Dorothy L. Sayers
#16. Pray silence for the soloist. But let him be soon over, that we may hear the great striding fugue again.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#17. I sleuth, you know. For a hobby. Harmless outlet for natural inquisitiveness, don't you see, which might otherwise strike inward and produce introspection an' suicide. Very natural, healthy pursuit
not too strenuous, not too sedentary; trains and invigorates the mind.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#19. In art, the Trinity is expressed in the Creative Idea, the Creative Energy, and the Creative Power - the first imagining of the work, then the making incarnate of the work, and third the meaning of the work.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#20. I didn't mind thinking you were a murderer," said Lady Mary spitefully, "but I do mind you being such an ass.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#21. I always think that the franker you are with people, the more you're likely to deceive 'em; so unused is the modern world to the open hand and the guileless heart,
Dorothy L. Sayers
#22. The incident had that rich savor of the ludicrous which neither pity nor charity can destroy. Unfortunately, she could not in decency share it with anybody; she could only enjoy it in lonely ecstasies of mirth.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#23. She was a long-necked, long-backed woman, who disciplined her hair and her children. She was never embarrassed, and her anger, though never permitted to be visible, made itself felt the more.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#24. Of all devils let loose in the world there is no devil like devoted love ...
Dorothy L. Sayers
#25. While time lasts there will always be a future, and that future will hold both good and evil, since the world is made to that mingled pattern.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#26. Still, it doesn't do to murder people, however offensive they may be.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#27. Heroics that don't come off are the very essence of burlesque.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#28. Sex is every man's loco spot ... he'll take a disappointment, but not a humiliation.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#29. What we make is more important than what we are, particularly if making is our profession.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#30. For they amount to this: that if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years,
Dorothy L. Sayers
#31. To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#32. My idea is that Miss Vane didn't do it," said Wimsey. "I dare say that's an idea which has already occurred to you, but with the weight of my great mind behind it, no doubt it strikes the imagination more forcibly.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#33. See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#34. Man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#35. Bother the right man!" cried Miss Findlater, crossly. "I do hate that kind of talk. It makes one feel dreadful - like a prize cow or something. Surely, we have got beyond that point of view in these days.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#36. Forgiveness does not wipe away the consequences of the sin. The consequences are borne by somebody.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#37. Nothing goes so well with a hot fire and buttered crumpets as a wet day without and a good dose of comfortable horrors within. The heavier the lashing of the rain and the ghastlier the details, the better the flavour seems to be.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#38. Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?
Dorothy L. Sayers
#39. However entrancing it is to wander unchecked through a garden of bright images, are we not enticing your mind from another subject of almost equal importance?
Dorothy L. Sayers
#40. Passion's a good, stupid horse that will pull the plough six days a week if you give him the run of his heels on Sundays. But love's a nervous, awkward, over-mastering brute; if you can't rein him, it's best to have no truck with him.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#41. To start with invention is the mark of the fertile mind ... and leads later to the interpretation of experience; to start with the reproduction of experience is the infallible index of a barren invention.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#42. Here am I, sweating my brains out to introduce a really sensational incident into your dull and disreputable little police investigation, and you refuse to show a single spark of enthusiasm.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#43. They cultivated normality till it stood out of them all over in knobs, like the muscles upon professional strong men, and scarcely looked normal at all. And they talked interminably and loudly. From their bouncing mental health ordinary ill-balanced mortals shrank in alarm.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#44. You may say you won't interfere with another person's soul, but you do - merely by existing. The snag about it is the practical difficulty, so to speak, of not existing.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#45. Why? Oh, well - I thought you'd be rather an attractive person to marry. That's all. I mean, I sort of took a fancy to you. I can't tell you why. There's no rule about it, you know.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#46. It was left for the present age to endow Covetousness with glamour on a big scale, and to give it a title which it could carry like a flag. It occurred to somebody to call it Enterprise. From the moment of that happy inspiration, Covetousness has gone forward and never looked back.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#47. The dogma of the Incarnation is the most dramatic thing about Christianity, and indeed, the most dramatic thing that ever entered the mind of man; but if you tell people so, they stare at you in bewilderment.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#48. The autobiography is at one and the same time a single element in the series of the writer's created works and an interpretation of the whole series.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#50. I know when I am well off. You had better come up to me.' 'You know I can't.' 'Of course you can't. You can only go down and down.' 'Are you trying to insult me?' 'Yes, but it's very difficult.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#52. Bunter: "I assure your lordship that for the firsttime in my existence I regret that I have made no practical study of campanology."
Wimsey: "I am always so delighted to find that there are things you cannot do.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#54. One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#55. God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own ... by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#56. Once lay down the rule that the job comes first and you throw that job open to every individual, man or woman, fat or thin, tall or short, ugly or beautiful, who is able to do that job better than the rest of the world.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#57. His [Lord Peter's] long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#58. Thank God!' said Wimsey. 'Where there is a church, there is civilisation.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#60. There's nothin' like Christian feelin's for upsettin' a man's domestic comfort.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#61. It will be sent that, although the writer's love is verily a jealous love, it is a jealousy for and not of his creatures. He will tolerate no interference either with them or between them and himself.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#62. Books ... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#63. Well, it's no good jumping at conclusions."
"Jump? You don't even crawl distantly within sight of a conclusion. I believe if you caught the cat with her head in the cream-jug you'd say it was conceivable that the jug was empty when she got there.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#64. A man was taken to the Zoo and shown the giraffe. After gazing at it a little in silence: 'I don't believe it,' he said.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#66. People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#67. All the children seem to be coming out quite intelligent, thank goodness. It would have been such a bore to be the mother of morons, and it's an absolute toss-up, isn't it? If one could only invent them, like characters in books, it would be much more satisfactory to a well-regulated mind.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#68. Nothing is more vulgar than a careful avoidance of beginning a letter with the first person singular)
Dorothy L. Sayers
#69. A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#70. There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#71. Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#74. We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#75. Together with this outrage we may take the mutilation of the novel called The Search at the exact point where the author upholds, or appears for the moment to uphold, the doctrine that loyalty to the abstract truth must override all personal considerations;
Dorothy L. Sayers
#76. _'You shouldn't say thank you for a good review,' said Harriet. 'That would imply that one had done a favour to the author, whereas one has simply done justice to the book.'_
Dorothy L. Sayers
#77. That a work of creation struggles and insistently demands to be brought into being is a fact that no genuine artist would think of denying.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#79. You cannot do good work if you take your mind off the work to see how the community is taking it.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#80. The glass-blower's cat is bompstable, said Mr. Parker aloud and distinctly.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#81. It is impossible for human nature to believe that money is not there. It seems so much more likely that the money is there and only needs bawling for.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#82. To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#83. A person who can believe all the articles of the Christian faith is not going to boggle over a trifle of adverse evidence.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#84. Do you know how to pick a lock?"
"Not in the least, I'm afraid."
"I often wonder what we go to school for," said Wimsey.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#85. I always said the professional advocate was the most amoral person on the face of the earth. I'm certain of it now.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#86. The first thing a principle does is to kill somebody.
Gaudy Night
Dorothy L. Sayers
#87. The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity the more massive the unity.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#88. I admit it is better fun to punt than be punted, and that a desire to have all the fun is nine-tenths of the law of chivalry.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#89. The artist's knowledge of his own creative nature is often unconscious; he pursues his mysterious way of life in a strange innocence.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#90. The best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people think, repose upon a manly bosom. Much more efficacious are honest work, physical activity, and the sudden acquisition of wealth.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#91. Darling, if you danced like an elderly elephant with arthritis, I would dance the sun and moon into the sea with you. I have waited a thousand years to see you dance in that frock.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#92. There is only one kind of wisdom that has any social value, and that is the knowledge of one's own limitations.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#93. February was sobbing and blustering its lachrymose way into March, when she received a letter from the Dean.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#94. How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do"
"Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#95. his thoughts revolving silently in this squirrel-cage of mystification.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#96. A continual atmosphere of hectic passion is very trying if you haven't got any of your own.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#97. Something was jigging and worrying in his brain; it felt like a hive of bees, stirred up by a stick.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#100. Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
