Dorothy L. Sayers - Gaudy Night (1935)

33 Sourced Quotes

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Those who make some other person their job... are dangerous.

Dorothy L. Sayers
The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.

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

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

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
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
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
Lambard may be a perverse old idiot, but it's more dignified not to say so in so many words. A bland and deadly courtesy is more devastating, don't you think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dorothy L. Sayers
He was beautifully sozzled last night, and had one breakfast before he came out and another with me at the Mitre. I do not envy the heart of youth, but only its head and stomach.

Dorothy L. Sayers
What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?

Dorothy L. Sayers
The first thing a principle does is kill somebody. - Lord Peter Wimsey

Dorothy L. Sayers
If it ever occurs to people to value the honor of the mind equally with the honor of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort.

Dorothy L. Sayers
I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid.

Dorothy L. Sayers
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.

Dorothy L. Sayers
Some people's blameless lives are to blame for a good deal.

Dorothy L. Sayers
A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.

Dorothy L. Sayers
The rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed... or find a still greater man to marry her.... The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all.

Dorothy L. Sayers
If people will bring dynamite into a powder factory, they must expect explosions.

Dorothy L. Sayers
She had one of those small, summery brains, that flower early and run to seed.

Dorothy L. Sayers
I know what you're thinking - that anybody with proper sensitive feelings would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feelings should prevent me from doing my proper job.

Dorothy L. Sayers