Top 234 Quotes & Sayings by Dorothy L. Sayers - Page 3

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.

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

Placetne, magistra?" "Placet.

[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.

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

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.

The best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people think, repose upon a manly bosom. Much more efficacious are honest work, physical activity, and the sudden acquisition of wealth.

Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.

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

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

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

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

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.

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.

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.

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

It is said that love and a cough cannot be hid.

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

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?

Christendom and heathendom now stand face to face... At bottom is a violent and irreconcilable quarrel about the nature of God and the nature of an and the ultimate nature of the universe; it is a war of dogma.

whereas, up to the present, there is only one known way of getting born, there are endless ways of getting killed.

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

It is as dangerous for people unaccustomed to handling words and unacquainted with their technique to tinker about with these heavily-charged nuclei of emotional power as it would be for me to burst into a laboratory and play about with a powerful electromagnet or other machine highly charged with electrical force.

Britain possesses no climate, only weather.

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

What the Church should be telling him [the carpenter] is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

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.

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

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

Once lay down the rule that the job comes first and you throw that job open to every individual, man or woman, fat or thin, tall or short, ugly or beautiful, who is able to do that job better than the rest of the world.

And heresy is, as I have tried to show, largely the expression of opinion of the untutored average man, trying to grapple with the problems of the universe at the point where they begin to interfere with his daily life and thought.

The artist's knowledge of his own creative nature is often unconscious; he pursues his mysterious way of life in a strange innocence.

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

There is no solution to death.Life intends to kill us.

All the children seem to be coming out quite intelligent, thank goodness. It would have been such a bore to be the mother of morons, and it’s an absolute toss-up, isn’t it? If one could only invent them, like characters in books, it would be much more satisfactory to a well-regulated mind.

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.

Fantasy works inwards upon its author, blurring the boundary between the visioned and the actual, and associating itself ever moreclosely with the Ego, so that the child who has fantasied himself a murderer ends by becoming a Loeb or a Leopold. The creative Imagination works outwards, steadily increasing the gap between the visioned and the actual, till this becomes the great gulf fixed between art and nature. Few writers of crime-stories become murderers--if any do, it is not the result of identifying themselves with their murderous heroes.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.

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.

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

To start with invention is the mark of the fertile mind ... and leads later to the interpretation of experience; to start with the reproduction of experience is the infallible index of a barren invention.

There are crimes which the Law cannot reach.

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.

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

The first thing a principle does is kill somebody

If we did not know all His retorts by heart, if we had not taken the sting out of them by incessant repetition in the accents of the pulpit, and if we had not somehow got it into our heads that brains were rather reprehnsible, we should reckon Him among the greatest wits of all time. Nobody else, in three brief years, has achieved such an output of epigram.

That there is a secret itself is a secret.

She reflected she must be completely besotted about Peter, if his laughter could hallow an aspidistra.

But that's men all over ... Poor dears, they can't help it. They haven't got logical minds.

No share-pusher could vend his worthless stock, if he could not count on meeting, in his prospective victim, an unscrupulous avarice as vicious as his own, but stupider. Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.

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

Forgiveness is the one unpardonable sin.

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.