Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

205 Sourced Quotes

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
All things that were, and now are, and shall be
Graven upon thy heart, have made thee wise.

Dorothy L. Sayers
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.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Birth is beastly — and death — and digestion, if it comes to that. Sometimes when I think of what's happening inside me to a beautiful suprème de sole, with the caviare in boats, and the croûtons and the jolly little twists of potato and all the gadgets — I could cry. But there it is, don't you know.

Dorothy L. Sayers
What we make is more important than what we are, particularly if making is our profession.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him — or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Everybody is, I suppose, either Classic or Gothic by nature. Either you feel in your bones that buildings should be rectangular boxes with lids to them, or you are moved to the marrow by walls that climb and branch, and break into a inflorescence of pinnacles.

Dorothy L. Sayers
What is the use of acquiring one's heart's desire if one cannot handle and gloat over it, show it to one's friends, and gather an anthology of envy and admiration?

Dorothy L. Sayers
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.

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
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
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.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Well-bred English people never have imagination...

Dorothy L. Sayers
At no point have I yet found artistic truth and theological truth at variance.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Lydia: Every great man has had a woman behind him.
Janet: And every great woman has had some man or other in front of her, tripping her up.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Don't be so damned discouraging," said Wimsey. "I have already carefully explained to you that this time I am investigating this business. Anybody would think you had no confidence in me." "People have been wrongly condemned before now." "Exactly; simply because I wasn't there." "I never thought of that.

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
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
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
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 think this co-operative scheme is an uncommonly good one. It's much easier to work on someone else's job than one's own - gives one that delightful feelin' of interferin' and bossin' about, combined with the glorious sensation that another fellow is takin' all one's own work off one's hands.

Dorothy L. Sayers
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.

Dorothy L. Sayers