Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

205 Sourced Quotes

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
The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realize the deadliness of principles.

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

Dorothy L. Sayers
My old mother always used to say, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you stare them in the face hard enough, they generally run away. - Bunter

Dorothy L. Sayers
Lord, teach us to take our hearts and look them in the face, however difficult it may be.

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 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
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 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
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
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
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
For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

Dorothy L. Sayers
The worst sin - perhaps the only sin - passion can commit, is to be joyless.

Dorothy L. Sayers
We don't want to make large and ignominious public mistakes.
Charles Parker

Dorothy L. Sayers
Books…are like lobster shells. We surround ourselves with 'em, and then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidences of our earlier stages of development.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Unlike music or poetry or painting, food rouses no response in passionate and emotional youth. Only when the surge of the blood is quieted does gastronomy come into its own with philosophy and theology and the sterner delights of the mind.

Dorothy L. Sayers
There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Lord Peter's large income... cost me nothing and at the time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Sex is every man's loco spot... he'll take a disappointment, but not a humiliation.

Dorothy L. Sayers
The first thing that strikes the careless observer is that women are unlike men. They are 'the opposite sex' — (though why 'opposite' I do not know; what is the 'neighbouring sex'?).

Dorothy L. Sayers
You cannot do good work if you take your mind off the work to see how the community is taking it.

Dorothy L. Sayers
But it is the mark of all movements, however well-intentioned, that their pioneers tend, by much lashing of themselves into excitement, to lose sight of the obvious.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Learning and literature have a way of outlasting the civilization that made them.

Dorothy L. Sayers