Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Even idiots ocasionally speak the truth accidentally.

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

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

But what are you going to do about the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?

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

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

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 only Christian work is good work, well done

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

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

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

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

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

The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.

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

Still, it doesn't do to murder people, no matter how offensive they may be.

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

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.

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

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.