Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

205 Sourced Quotes

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
The best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people seem to think, repose upon a manly bosom. Much more efficacious are honest work, physical activity, and the sudden acquisition of wealth.

Dorothy L. Sayers
There is something about wills which brings out the worst side of human nature. People who under ordinary circumstances are perfectly upright and amiable, go as curly as corkscrews and foam at the mouth, whenever they hear the words 'I devise and bequeath.

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
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
He dogs my footsteps with the incompetent zeal of fifty Watsons. - Lord Peter Wimsey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dorothy L. Sayers
There is also one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or other, been taught. Even if we learned nothing-perhaps in particular if we learned nothing-our contribution to the discussion may have a potential value.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Well, it seems like a miracle to be able to look forward-to-to see all the minutes in front of one come hopping along with something marvellous in them, instead of just[Pg 295] saying, Well, that one didn't actually hurt and the next may be quite bearable if only something beastly doesn't come pouncing out--

Dorothy L. Sayers
It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe.

Dorothy L. Sayers
There are times when one is tempted to say that the great, sprawling, lethargic sin of Sloth is the oldest and greatest of the sins and the parent of all the rest.

Dorothy L. Sayers