Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

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.

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

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

It is ridiculous to take on a man's job just in order to be able to say that 'a woman has done it - yah!' The only decent reason for tackling a job is that it is your job and you want to do 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you know how to pick a lock?" "Not in the least, I'm afraid." "I often wonder what we go to school for," said Wimsey.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

We cannot really look at the movement of the Spirit, just because It is the Power by which we do the looking.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

There are crimes which the Law cannot reach.

That there is a secret itself is a secret.

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.

You cannot do good work if you take your mind off the work to see how the community is taking it.

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

The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realize the deadliness of principles.

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

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

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

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.

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

For God's sake, let's take the word 'possess' and put a brick round its neck and drown it ... We can't possess one another. We can only give and hazard all we have.

The Devil is a spiritual lunatic, but, like many lunatics, he is extremely plausible and cunning.

What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

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.

Very dangerous things, theories.

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