Dorothy L. Sayers quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy L. Sayers Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Dorothy L. Sayers on Wise Famous Quotes.

I hope you won't mind, because I haven't shaved since this morning, but I'm going to take you round the next quiet corner and kiss you.

Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject.

People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.

A man was taken to the Zoo and shown the giraffe. After gazing at it a little in silence: 'I don't believe it,' he said.

If anybody ever marries you, it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle

Oh, well, faint heart never won so much as a scrap of paper

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.

Make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression.

Theology is the mistress-science, without which the whole educational structure will necessarily lack its final synthesis.

The keeping of an idle woman is a badge of superior social status.

Man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something.

To mention honor was to suggest its opposite.

First I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense inn it.

The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns.

A human being must have occupation, of he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

I am better off with vegetables at the bottom of my garden than with all the fairies of the Midsummer Night's Dream.

How true it is that men live for Things and women for People!

In the first part, the master-faculties are Observation and Memory, so in the second, the master-faculty is the Discursive Reason.

I admit it is better fun to punt than be punted, and that a desire to have all the fun is nine-tenths of the law of chivalry.

No," said Harriet, who had been exercising

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

Advertising never sold a bad product twice.

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

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

Harriet laughed, remembering suddenly that a novelist owes a duty to her newspaper reporters.

It is impossible for human nature to believe that money is not there. It seems so much more likely that the money is there and only needs bawling for.

February was sobbing and blustering its lachrymose way into March, when she received a letter from the Dean.

I say - I don't mind betting this is the most popular thing Campbell ever did. Nothing in life became him like the leaving of it, eh, what?

At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature!

There are many difficulties inherent in a teleological view of creation, said Parker placidly.

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do"
"Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

I have rather an unwholesome weakness for policemen.

I always said the professional advocate was the most amoral person on the face of the earth. I'm certain of it now.

Lord Peter Wimsey stretched himself luxuriously between the sheets provided by the Hotel Meurice.

I beg your pardon," said Lord Peter, "I was quoting poetry. Very silly of me. I got the habit at my mother's knee and I can't break myself of it.

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

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

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

When cats sat staring into the fire they were thinking out problems.

Herein fail not at your peril.

The first thing a principle does is to kill somebody.
Gaudy Night

There is undoubtedly something irritating about the favorites of fortune.

The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.

Remorse is eating his soul like a caterpillar in a cabbage.

Forgiveness does not wipe away the consequences of the sin. The consequences are borne by somebody.

A woman fit to be a man's wife is too good to be his servant.

I like to crawl away and hide in a corner."
"Well," he said, with a transitory gleam of himself, "you're my corner and I've come to hide.

his thoughts revolving silently in this squirrel-cage of mystification.

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

You can always turn a tragedy into a comedy by sitting down.

There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.

I have never yet heard any middle-aged man or woman who worked with his or her brains express any regret for the passing of youth.

If it were not for the war, this war would suit me down to the ground.

What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?

If you want your own way, God will let you have it. Hell is the enjoyment of one's own way forever.

Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age.

Very dangerous things, theories.

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

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.

I took the liberty of ascertaining as much beforehand, my lord."
"Of course you did, Bunter. You always ascertain everything.

In detective stories virtue is always triumphant. They're the purest literature we have

Advertise, or go under.

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.

And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? I love you- I am at rest with you- I have come home.

Let the galled jade wince' -

The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.

Plain lies are dangerous.

The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity the more massive the unity.

It's not the innocent young things that need gentle handling
it's the ones that have been frightened and hurt.

I didn't mind thinking you were a murderer," said Lady Mary spitefully, "but I do mind you being such an ass.

For among my people are found wicked men: they lay wait, as he that setteth snares; they set a trap, they catch men.

Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?"
"So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.

Something was jigging and worrying in his brain; it felt like a hive of bees, stirred up by a stick.

We ought to recognise the profound gulf between the work to which we are 'called' and the work we are forced into as a means of livelihood.

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

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.

Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;
If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!

The planet's tyrant, dotard Death, had held his gray mirror before them for a moment and shown them the image of things to come.

Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.

It is always reasonably easy to get conversation going in a pub, and it will be a black day for detectives when beer is abolished. After

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

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.

It's very inconvenient being a sculptor. It's like playing the double-bass; one's so handicapped by one's baggage.

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.

There's something hypnotic about the word tea.

Jesus Christ is the only God who has a date in history.

Even if it is the twilight of the world, before night falls I will sleep in your arms.' ...

I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.

in the linked arms of Bacchus and Aphrodite.

She couldn't have found anything nastier to say if she had thought it out with both hands for a fortnight.

Nothing is more cruel to the young than to tell them that the world is made for youth.

His lordship is in the enjoyment of very low spirits, owing to his inexplicable inability to bend Providence to his own designs.

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.

To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.

You needn't try to bully me, young man," said that octogenarian with spirit, "settin' there spoilin' your stomach with them nasty jujubes.

There are crimes which the Law cannot reach.

She always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.

Don't let the smallest chance slip by; you never know until you try

Jerrykins, or Pickled Gherkins. Lord Peter was not one of those born uncles who delight old nurses by their

One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.