Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

205 Sourced Quotes

While time lasts there will always be a future, and that future will hold both good and evil, since the world is made to that mingled pattern.

Dorothy L. Sayers
"Must have facts," said Lord Peter, "facts. When I was a small boy I always hated facts. Thought of 'em as nasty, hard things, all knobs. Uncompromisin'."

Dorothy L. Sayers
To suppress a fact is to publish a falsehood.

Dorothy L. Sayers
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.

Dorothy L. Sayers
To start with invention is the mark of the fertile mind... and leads later to the interpretation of experience; to start with the reproduction of experience is the infallible index of a barren invention.

Dorothy L. Sayers
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.

Dorothy L. Sayers
To make a precise scientific description of reality out of words is like trying to build a rigid structure out of pure quicksilver.

Dorothy L. Sayers
The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man-and the dogma is the drama... The plot pivots upon a single character, and the whole action is the answer to a single central problem: 'What think ye of Christ?'... He was emphatically not a dull m an in his human lifetime, and if he was God, there can be nothing dull about God either.

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

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
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
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
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
We cannot really look at the movement of the Spirit, just because It is the Power by which we do the looking.

Dorothy L. Sayers
It seems to me quite disastrous that the idea should have got about that Christianity is an other-worldly, unreal, idealistic kind of religion that suggests that if we are good we shall be happy. On the contrary, it is fiercely and even harshly realistic, insisting that there are certain eternal achievements that make even happiness look like trash.

Dorothy L. Sayers
That you cannot have Christian principles without Christ is becoming increasingly clear, because their validity as principles depends on Christ's authority.

Dorothy L. Sayers
How true it is that men live for Things and women for People!

Dorothy L. Sayers
A human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

Dorothy L. Sayers
A person who tells a secret, swearing the recipient to secrecy in turn, is asking of the other person a discretion which he is abrogating himself.

Dorothy L. Sayers
I'm getting very old and my bones ache. My sins are deserting me, and if I could only have my time over again I'd take care to commit more of them.

Dorothy L. Sayers
He remembered having said to his uncle (with a solemn dogmatism better befitting a much younger man): "Surely it is possible to love with the head as well as the heart." Mr. Delagardie had replied, somewhat drily: "No doubt; so long as you do not end by thinking with your entrails instead of your brain.

Dorothy L. Sayers
The popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling.

Dorothy L. Sayers
I entirely agree that a historian ought to be precise in detail; but unless you take all the characters and circumstances into account, you are reckoning without the facts. The proportions and relations of things are just as much facts as the things themselves.

Dorothy L. Sayers
God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own... by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators.

Dorothy L. Sayers
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.

Dorothy L. Sayers
We've got to laugh or break our hearts in this damnable world.

Dorothy L. Sayers
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.

Dorothy L. Sayers
What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

Dorothy L. Sayers