Top 234 Quotes & Sayings by Dorothy L. Sayers

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British author Dorothy L. Sayers.
Last updated on November 25, 2024.
Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy Leigh Sayers was an English crime writer and poet. She was also a student of classical and modern languages.

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.
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.
If it were not for the war, this war would suit me down to the ground. — © Dorothy L. Sayers
If it were not for the war, this war would suit me down to the ground.
The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.
I love you - I am at rest with you - I have come home.
A continual atmosphere of hectic passion is very trying if you haven't got any of your own.
Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age.
A human being must have occupation, of he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.
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.
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.
The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man - and the dogma is the drama.
Trouble shared is trouble halved.
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.
Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him. — © Dorothy L. Sayers
Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.
Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject.
Those who make some other person their job... are dangerous.
I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.
Very dangerous things, theories.
There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.
The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
She always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.
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.
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.
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.
One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.
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.
To know one's own limitations is the hallmark of competence.
A human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
If men will not understand the meaning of judgement, they will never come to understand the meaning of grace.
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."
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.
It is not the business of the church to adapt Christ to men, but men to Christ. — © Dorothy L. Sayers
It is not the business of the church to adapt Christ to men, but men to Christ.
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.
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.
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.
Every great man has a woman behind him ... And every great woman has some man or other in front of her, tripping her up.
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.
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.
The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man-and the dogma is the drama ... The plot pivots upon a single character, and the whole action is the answer to a single central problem: 'What think ye of Christ?'... He was emphatically not a dull m an in his human lifetime, and if he was God, there can be nothing dull about God either.
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.
Everybody is, I suppose, either Classic or Gothic by nature. Either you feel in your bones that buildings should be rectangular boxes with lids to them, or you are moved to the marrow by walls that climb and branch, and break into a inflorescence of pinnacles.
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! — © Dorothy L. Sayers
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 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.
If you want your own way, God will let you have it. Hell is the enjoyment of one's own way forever.
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.
Man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something.
A woman fit to be a man's wife is too good to be his servant.
To foment grievance and to set men at variance is the trade by which agitators thrive and journalists make money.
Lord, teach us to take our hearts and look them in the face, however difficult it may be.
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.
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.
Jesus Christ is the only God who has a date in history.
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.
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