Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

And heresy is, as I have tried to show, largely the expression of opinion of the untutored average man, trying to grapple with the problems of the universe at the point where they begin to interfere with his daily life and thought.

No, no, there must be a limit to the baseness even of publishers.

Placetne, magistra?" "Placet.

To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems...which he has to solve...And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of-such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilized amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity....Perhaps the first thing he can learn form the artists is that the only way of 'mastering' one's material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant.

there is undoubtedly something irritating about the favorites of fortune.

Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age.

It is not the business of the church to adapt Christ to men, but men to Christ.

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.

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!

[Did you] ever know a sincere emotion to express itself in a subordinate clause?

There is only one kind of wisdom that has any social value, and that is the knowledge of one's own limitations.

One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.

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.

Learning and literature have a way of outlasting the civilization that made them.

For God's sake, let's take the word 'possess' and put a brick round its neck and drown it ... We can't possess one another. We can only give and hazard all we have.

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject.

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.

The ideal of a perfectly functioning democracy is one person, one vote; the ideal of a perfectly functioning market is one dollar, one vote.It's a hoary superstition that democratically elected governments invariably function as instruments of the collective will.A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste.

And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? I love you - I am at rest with you - I have come home.

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.

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.

The first thing that strikes the careless observer is that women are unlike men. They are 'the opposite sex' - (though why 'opposite' I do not know; what is the 'neighbouring sex'?).

If anybody ever marries you, it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle

He was being about as protective as a can-opener.

Britain possesses no climate, only weather.

To foment grievance and to set men at variance is the trade by which agitators thrive and journalists make money.

I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.

Have you noticed that the astronomers and mathematicians are much the most cheerful people of the lot? I suppose that perpetually contemplating things on so vast a scale makes them feel either that it doesn't matter a hoot anyway, or that anything so large and elaborate must have some sense in it somewhere.

Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?" "So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

She couldn't have found anything nastier to say if she had thought it out with both hands for a fortnight.

Heroics that don't come off are the very essence of burlesque.

Very dangerous things, theories.

To subdue one's self to one's own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one's self to other people's ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltness of those dead sea apples.

A woman fit to be a man's wife is too good to be his servant.

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.

But if it ever occurs to people to value the honor of the mind equally with the honor of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort — and very different from the kind that is being made at the moment.

Oh, well, faint heart never won so much as a scrap of paper

It is the first duty of a gentleman to remember in the morning who he went to bed with the night before.

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.

I have never regretted Paradise Lost since I discovered that it contained no eggs-and-bacon.

If you want your own way, God will let you have it. Hell is the enjoyment of one's own way forever.

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.

People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.

A continual atmosphere of hectic passion is very trying if you haven't got any of your own.

It is ridiculous to take on a man's job just in order to be able to say that 'a woman has done it - yah!' The only decent reason for tackling a job is that it is your job and you want to do it.

I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.