Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

205 Sourced Quotes

And then, of course, so many of our little lot seem to be running love-affairs. And a continual atmosphere of hectic passion is very trying if you haven't got any of your own.

Dorothy L. Sayers
She always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away. She is a very courageous woman, my lord.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Those who make some other person their job... are dangerous.

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

Dorothy L. Sayers
The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Death in particular seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent amusement than any other single subject.

Dorothy L. Sayers
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.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.

Dorothy L. Sayers
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. - Lord Peter Wimsey to Harriet Vane, now his wife

Dorothy L. Sayers
What do we find God 'doing about' this business of sin and evil?... God did not abolish the fact of evil; He transformed it. He did not stop the Crucifixion; He rose from the dead.

Dorothy L. Sayers
On the strength of his literary output alone... any woman of sense would decline to tackle D.H. Lawrence at 1,000 pounds a night.

Dorothy L. Sayers
If we did not know all His retorts by heart, if we had not taken the sting out of them by incessant repetition in the accents of the pulpit, and if we had not somehow got it into our heads that brains were rather reprehensible, we should reckon Him among the greatest wits of all time. Nobody else, in three brief years, has achieved such an output of epigram.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Whereas, up to the present, there is only one known way of getting born, there are endless ways of getting killed.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Wait a second... I'm not sure that you haven't said something useful and important. - Lord Peter Wimsey

Dorothy L. Sayers
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
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
Lambard may be a perverse old idiot, but it's more dignified not to say so in so many words. A bland and deadly courtesy is more devastating, don't you think?

Dorothy L. Sayers
Wherever trouble turns up, there am I at the bottom of it. - Lord Peter Wimsey

Dorothy L. Sayers
Miss Findlater spoke with the air of a disillusioned rake, who has sucked life's orange and found it dead sea fruit.

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

Dorothy L. Sayers
She suddenly saw Wimsey in a new light. She knew him to be intelligent, clean, courteous, wealthy, well-read, amusing and enamored, but he had not so far produced in her that crushing sense of inferiority which leads to prostration and hero-worship. But she now realized that there was, after all, something godlike about him. He could control a horse.

Dorothy L. Sayers
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. - Lord Peter Wimsey

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

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

Dorothy L. Sayers