Top 100 Dorothy L Sayers Quotes
#2. I hope you won't mind, because I haven't shaved since this morning, but I'm going to take you round the next quiet corner and kiss you.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#3. I took the liberty of ascertaining as much beforehand, my lord."
"Of course you did, Bunter. You always ascertain everything.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#4. Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath they feed a hunger for justice ... you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#5. Harriet laughed, remembering suddenly that a novelist owes a duty to her newspaper reporters.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#6. 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
#7. What? Sunday morning in an English family and no sausages? God bless my soul, what's the world coming to, eh?
Dorothy L. Sayers
#8. There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#9. Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#10. In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#12. Perhaps you didn't say much about him, mother, but Gerald said lots - dreadful things!'
'Yes,' said the Duchess, 'he said what he thought. The present generation does, you know. To the uninitiated, I admit, dear, it does sound a little rude.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#13. What is the use of acquiring one's heart's desire if one cannot handle and gloat over it, show it to one's friends, and gather an anthology of envy and admiration?
Dorothy L. Sayers
#15. He had the appeal of a very young dog of a very large breed
a kind of amiable absurdity.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#16. So she will," said the Dowager. "You'll see that young man in the Cabinet before very long. Such a handsome couple on a public platform, and very sound, I'm told, about pigs, and that's so important, the British breakfast-table being what it is.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#17. 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
#18. I have never regretted Paradise Lost since I discovered that it contained no eggs-and-bacon.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#19. 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
#20. But it is the mark of all movements, however well-intentioned, that their pioneers tend, by much lashing of themselves into excitement, to lose sight of the obvious.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#21. Thank you. This line of salt is the beach. And this piece of bread is a rock at low-water level.' Wimsey twitched his chair closer to the table. 'And this salt-spoon,' he said, with childlike enjoyment, 'can be the body.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. It is the first duty of a gentleman to remember in the morning who he went to bed with the night before.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#25. It's not the innocent young things that need gentle handling
it's the ones that have been frightened and hurt.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#28. Praise God (or whatever it is) from (if direction exists) whom (if personality exists) all blessings (if that word corresponds to any percept of objective reality) flow (if Heraclitus and Bergson and Einstein are correct in stating that everything is more or less flowing about).
Dorothy L. Sayers
#29. We are so made that we soon grow weary of ornament for sake of ornament, and even of beauty that makes no appeal to the heart or the understanding.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#30. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#31. The trouble is ... that everybody sneers at restrictions and demands freedom, till something annoying happens; then they demand angrily what has become of the discipline.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#32. We cannot really look at the movement of the Spirit, just because It is the Power by which we do the looking.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#33. Think of it - all ours, to do as we like with, for as Harold Skimpole so rightly observes, £60 saved is £60 gained, and I'd reckoned on spending it all.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#34. If men will not understand the meaning of judgement, they will never come to understand the meaning of grace.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#35. Jerrykins, or Pickled Gherkins. Lord Peter was not one of those born uncles who delight old nurses by their
Dorothy L. Sayers
#36. 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
#37. What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?
Dorothy L. Sayers
#38. What'll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?" demanded Miss Haydock.
"Well, Eve
it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only did it by looking fragile and pathetic at the viva.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#40. 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
#41. The Devil ... is much better served by exploiting our virtues than by appealing to our lower passions; consequently, it is when the Devil looks most noble and reasonable that he is most dangerous.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#43. 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
#44. If people will bring dynamite into a powder factory, they must expect explosions.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#46. But to Lord Peter the world presented itself as an entertaining labyrinth of side-issues
Dorothy L. Sayers
#47. To foment grievance and to set men at variance is the trade by which agitators thrive and journalists make money.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#48. Pray silence for the soloist. But let him be soon over, that we may hear the great striding fugue again.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#49. 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
#51. The departure of the church-going element had induced a more humanitarian atmosphere.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#54. 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
#55. I like to crawl away and hide in a corner."
"Well," he said, with a transitory gleam of himself, "you're my corner and I've come to hide.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#56. 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
#57. You needn't try to bully me, young man," said that octogenarian with spirit, "settin' there spoilin' your stomach with them nasty jujubes.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#58. There is one vast human experience that confronts us so formidably that we cannot pretend to overlook it. There is no solution to death. There is no means whatever whereby you or I, by taking thought, can solve this difficulty in such a manner that it no longer exists.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#59. Most people don't associate anythin'
their ideas just roll about like so many dry peas on a tray, makin' a lot of noise and goin' nowhere, but once you begin lettin' 'em string their peas into a necklace, it's goin' to be strong enough to hang you, what?
Dorothy L. Sayers
#60. Unlike music or poetry or painting, food rouses no response in passionate and emotional youth. Only when the surge of the blood is quieted does gastronomy come into its own with philosophy and theology and the sterner delights of the mind.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#61. The modern boy and girl are certainly taught more subjects - but does that always mean that they actually know more?
Dorothy L. Sayers
#62. The more genuinely creative [the writer] is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself
Dorothy L. Sayers
#63. A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. She went to bed thinking more about another person than about herself. This goes to prove that even minor poetry may have its practical uses.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#68. Of all devils let loose in the world there is no devil like devoted love ...
Dorothy L. Sayers
#69. 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
#70. At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature!
Dorothy L. Sayers
#71. The doctrine of hell is not "mediaeval priestcraft" for frightening people into giving money to the church: it is Christ's deliberate judgment on sin ... We cannot repudiate hell without altogether repudiating Christ.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#72. What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: "You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls"; if the answer is, "But I don't," there is no more to be said.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#73. The brutal fact is that in this Christian country not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion what the Church teaches about God or man or society or the person of Jesus Christ.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#74. Still, it doesn't do to murder people, however offensive they may be.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#75. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#76. Heroics that don't come off are the very essence of burlesque.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#77. Sex is every man's loco spot ... he'll take a disappointment, but not a humiliation.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#78. What we make is more important than what we are, particularly if making is our profession.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#80. We shall know what things are of overmastering importance when they have overmastered us.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. I'm getting very old and my bones ache. My sins are deserting me, and if I could only have my time over again I'd take care to commit more of them.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#84. The war has jerked us pretty sharply into consciousness about this slug-a-bed sin of Sloth, and perhaps we need not say too much about it. But two warnings are rather necessary.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#85. Protested Mrs. Featherstone, a lady in her thirties, whose violently compressed figure suggested that she was engaged in a perpetual struggle to compute her weight in terms of the first syllables of her name rather than the last.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#86. Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;
If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!
Dorothy L. Sayers
#87. 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
#88. I know what an Act to make things simpler means. It means that the people who drew it up don't understand it themselves and that every one of its clauses needs a law-suit to disentangle it.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#89. 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
#90. A passage is not plain English - still less is it good English - if we are obliged to read it twice to find out what it means.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#91. Man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#92. 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
#93. Forgiveness does not wipe away the consequences of the sin. The consequences are borne by somebody.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#94. 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
#95. Anythin' wrong leaves a kind of impression on the eye; brain trots along afterwards with the warnin'.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#96. 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
#97. No, no, there must be a limit to the baseness even of publishers.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#98. I've hated almost everything that ever happened to me, but I knew all the time it was just things that were wrong, not everything. Even when I felt most awful I never thought of killing myself or wanting to die - only of somehow getting out of the mess and starting again.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#99. The planet's tyrant, dotard Death, had held his gray mirror before them for a moment and shown them the image of things to come.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#100. How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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