Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

He had the appeal of a very young dog of a very large breed -- a kind of amiable absurdity.

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.

It's not the innocent young things that need gentle handling--it's the ones that have been frightened and hurt.

When cats sat staring into the fire they were thinking out problems.

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.

None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can't teach people that - they have to learn by experience.

The rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed ... or find a still greater man to marry her. ... The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all.

We ought to recognise the profound gulf between the work to which we are 'called' and the work we are forced into as a means of livelihood.

A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.

The keeping of an idle woman is a badge of superior social status.

I say, I don’t think the human frame is very thoughtfully constructed for this sleuthhound business. If one could go on all fours, or had eyes in ones knees, it would be a lot more practical’… ‘What luck! Here’s a deep, damp ditch on the other side, which I shall now proceed to fall into.’ A slithering crash proclaimed that he had carried out his intention.

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.

It's very inconvenient being a sculptor. It's like playing the double-bass; one's so handicapped by one's baggage.

I think the most joyous thing in life is to loaf around and watch another bloke do a job of work. Look how popular are the men who dig up London with electric drills. Duke's son, cook's son, son of a hundred kings, people will stand there for hours on end, ear drums splitting. Why? Simply for the pleasure of being idle while watching other people work.

I have never yet heard any middle-aged man or woman who worked with his or her brains express any regret for the passing of youth.

I gather that he nearly knocked you down, damaged your property, and generally made a nuisance of himself, and that you instantly concluded he must be some relation to me.

A person who tells a secret, swearing the recipient to secrecy in turn, is asking of the other person a discretion which he is abrogating himself.

We shall know what things are of overmastering importance when they have overmastered us.

He remembered having said to his uncle (with a solemn dogmatism better befitting a much younger man): "Surely it is possible to love with the head as well as the heart." Mr. Delagardie had replied, somewhat drily: "No doubt; so long as you do not end by thinking with your entrails instead of your brain.

Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of thinking and living bring about intolerable situations ... the root causes of conflict are usually to be found in some wrong way of life in which all parties have acquiesced, and for which everybody must, to some extent, bear the blame.

There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.

Man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something.

I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.

He was so crooked, you could have used his spine for a safety-pin.

But what are you going to do about the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?

To know one's own limitations is the hallmark of competence.

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.

We cannot really look at the movement of the Spirit, just because It is the Power by which we do the looking.

The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore - on the contrary; they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround Him with an atmosphere of tedium.

There are crimes which the Law cannot reach.

make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.

The only Christian work is good work, well done

Trouble shared is trouble halved.

Work is not primarily a thing one does to live but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.

Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There's yeast in bread, but you can't make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow.

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.

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.

She always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.

I know what you're thinking - that anybody with proper sensitive feelings would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feelings should prevent me from doing my proper job.

What the Church should be telling him [the carpenter] is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

Still, it doesn't do to murder people, no matter how offensive they may be.

Advertising never sold a bad product twice.

the heaviest restriction upon the freedom of public opinion is not the official censorship of the Press, but the unofficial censorship by a Press which exists not so much to express opinion as to manufacture it.

A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, for such a society is a house built upon sand.

There is no solution to death.Life intends to kill us.

It is said that love and a cough cannot be hid.

... at no point have I yet found artistic truth and theological truth at variance.