Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

205 Sourced Quotes

To-morrow, yes, those songs will break my heart,
But I am only very glad to-night.

Dorothy L. Sayers
There is only one kind of wisdom that has any social value, and that is the knowledge of one's own limitations.

Dorothy L. Sayers
A passage is not plain English — still less is it good English — if we are obliged to read it twice to find out what it means.

Dorothy L. Sayers
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought. - Lord Peter Wimsey

Dorothy L. Sayers
Variety, individuality, peculiarity, eccentricity and indeed crankiness are agreeable to the British mind; they make life more interesting.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Mrs. Henry Wood... is a little too fond of calling in Providence to cut the knot of intrigue with the sword of coincidence.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Far from it, as the private said when he aimed at the bulls-eye and hit the gunnery instructor.

Dorothy L. Sayers
What's the damn good of it, Wimsey? A man goes and fights for his country, gets his inside gassed out, and loses his job, and all they give him is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph once a year and paying four shillings in the pound income-tax. - George Fentiman

Dorothy L. Sayers
There is undoubtedly something irritating about the favorites of fortune.

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

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

Dorothy L. Sayers
Of all devils let loose in the world there is no devil like devoted love.

Dorothy L. Sayers
The dogma of the Incarnation is the most dramatic thing about Christianity, and indeed, the most dramatic thing that ever entered the mind of man; but if you tell people so, they stare at you in bewilderment.

Dorothy L. Sayers
The autobiography is at one and the same time a single element in the series of the writer's created works and an interpretation of the whole series.

Dorothy L. Sayers
I gather that he nearly knocked you down, damaged your property, and generally made a nuisance of himself, and that you instantly concluded he must be some relation to me.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of thinking and living bring about intolerable situations... the root causes of conflict are usually to be found in some wrong way of life in which all parties have acquiesced, and for which everybody must, to some extent, bear the blame.

Dorothy L. Sayers
It is not the business of the church to adapt Christ to men, but men to Christ.

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
Heroics that don't come off are the very essence of burlesque.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Do you know how to pick a lock?" "Not in the least, I'm afraid." "I often wonder what we go to school for," said Wimsey.

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
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