Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

205 Sourced Quotes

Those who make some other person their job... are dangerous.

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

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

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

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
I'm told I make love rather nicely. Though I am at a bit of a disadvantage at the moment. One can't be too convincing at the other end of the table with a bloke looking in the window. - Lord Peter Wimsey

Dorothy L. Sayers
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
What? Sunday morning in an English family and no sausages? God bless my soul, what's the world coming to, eh?

Dorothy L. Sayers
The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.

Dorothy L. Sayers
If anybody does marry you it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle. - Harriet Vane

Dorothy L. Sayers
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.

Dorothy L. Sayers
There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.

Dorothy L. Sayers
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
She resented the way in which he walked in and out of her mind as if it was his own flat.

Dorothy L. Sayers
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
Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Herein is all the peace of heaven:
To know we have failed and are forgiven.

Dorothy L. Sayers
As I grow older and older,
And totter towards the tomb,
I find that I care less and less
Who goes to bed with whom.

Dorothy L. Sayers
First I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense inn it.

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

Dorothy L. Sayers
He had the appeal of a very young dog of a very large breed — a kind of amiable absurdity.

Dorothy L. Sayers
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
The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables. Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly—but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever came out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth.

Dorothy L. Sayers
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.

Dorothy L. Sayers
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