Dorothy L. Sayers Quotations

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

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

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

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

I love you - I am at rest with you - I have come home.

None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can't teach people that - they have to learn by experience.

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

The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.

As I grow older and older, And totter toward the tomb, I find that I care less and less, Who goes to bed with whom.

The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.

Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.

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

There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks.

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

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

A continual atmosphere of hectic passion is very trying if you haven't got any of your own.

Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.

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

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.

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

In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair...the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.

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.

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

As I grow older and older, And totter toward the tomb, I find that I care less and less Who goes to bed with whom.

Work is not primarily a thing one does to live but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.

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.

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.

What do we find God 'doing about' this business of sin and evil?...God did not abolish the fact of evil; He transformed it. He did not stop the Crucifixion; He rose from the dead.

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.

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.

If men will not understand the meaning of judgement, they will never come to understand the meaning of grace.

The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore - on the contrary; they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround Him with an atmosphere of tedium.

Every great man has a woman behind him ... And every great woman has some man or other in front of her, tripping her up.

I often think when a man's once past a certain age, the older he grows the tougher he gets, and women the same or more so.

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

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.

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

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.

I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.

I think the most joyous thing in life is to loaf around and watch another bloke do a job of work. Look how popular are the men who dig up London with electric drills. Duke's son, cook's son, son of a hundred kings, people will stand there for hours on end, ear drums splitting. Why? Simply for the pleasure of being idle while watching other people work.

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.

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.

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

Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath they feed a hunger for justice ... you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living.

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

[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.

That there is a secret itself is a secret.

the truth and value of a theory does not depend on the number of people who are interested in it - otherwise you might compare the number of people who follow the predictions of astrologers in the daily press with those who attend lectures by Einstein, and conclude that astrology was more valuable and true than physics.

The business of the artist is not to escape from his material medium or bully it, but to serve it; but to serve it, he must love it. If he does so, he will realise that in its service is perfect freedom.

What? Sunday morning in an English family and no sausages? God bless my soul, what's the world coming to, eh?

the heaviest restriction upon the freedom of public opinion is not the official censorship of the Press, but the unofficial censorship by a Press which exists not so much to express opinion as to manufacture it.

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 trouble is. . .that everybody sneers at restrictions and demands freedom, till something annoying happens; then they demand angrily what has become of the discipline.

There are crimes which the Law cannot reach.

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

He was so crooked, you could have used his spine for a safety-pin.

[T]he more clamour we make about 'the women's point of view', the more we rub it into people that the women's point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is -- at least in my job. The line I always want to take is, that there is the 'point of view' of the reasonably enlightened human brain, and that this is the aspect of the matter which I am best fitted to uphold.

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

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.

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

To subdue one's self to one's own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one's self to other people's ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltness of those dead sea apples.

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.

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.

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

The only Christian work is good work, well done

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

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

Have you noticed that the astronomers and mathematicians are much the most cheerful people of the lot? I suppose that perpetually contemplating things on so vast a scale makes them feel either that it doesn't matter a hoot anyway, or that anything so large and elaborate must have some sense in it somewhere.

In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

[W]hen I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can't find it heroic, or kind, or anything but pretty rotten and feeble.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.

I have never regretted Paradise Lost since I discovered that it contained no eggs-and-bacon.

There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man, and by behaving in conformity with which, man may enjoy his true freedom.

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

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

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

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

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

But you see, I can believe a thing without understanding it. It's all a matter of training.

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

To know one's own limitations is the hallmark of competence.

Except ye become as little children, except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, "ye cannot enter the kingdom of God." One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.

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

The recognition of the truth that we get in the artist's work comes to us as a revelation of new truth. We did not know it before, but the moment it is shown to us, we know that, somehow or other, we had always known it.

The ideal of a perfectly functioning democracy is one person, one vote; the ideal of a perfectly functioning market is one dollar, one vote.It's a hoary superstition that democratically elected governments invariably function as instruments of the collective will.A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste.

God wastes nothing - not even sin. The soul that has struggled and come through is enriched by it's experiences, and Grace does not merely blot out the evil past but in the most literal sense "makes it good."

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Perhaps [the critics are right and] the drama is played out now and Jesus is safely dead and buried. Perhaps. It is ironical and entertaining to consider that at least once in the world's history those words might have been said with complete conviction, and that was on the eve of the Resurrection.

Trouble shared is trouble halved.

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.

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.

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

We may argue eloquently that 'Honesty is the best Policy' - unfortunately, the moment honesty is adopted for the sake of policy it mysteriously ceases to be honesty.