1. Top Famous Quotes
    2. /
  2. Dorothy L Sayers Quotes

Top Dorothy L Sayers Quotes

Browse top 135 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Dorothy L Sayers.

Favorite Dorothy L Sayers Quotes

1. "Philip wasn't the sort of man to make a friend of a woman. He wanted devotion. I gave him that. I did, you know. But I couldn't stand being made a fool of. I couldn;t stand being put on probation, like an office-boy, to see if I was good enough to be condescended to. I quite thought he was honest when he said he didn't believe in marriage -- and then it turned out that it was a test, to see whether my devotion was abject enough. Well, it wasn't. I didn't like having matrimony offered as a bad-conduct prize." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
2. "Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?" ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
3. "[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
4. "Harriet was silent. She suddenly saw Wimsey in a new light. She knew him to be intelligent, clean, courteous, wealthy, well-read, amusing and enamoured, but he had not so far produced in her that crushing sense of utter inferiority which leads to prostration and hero-worship. But she now realised that there was, after all, something god-like about him. He could control a horse." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
5. "The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
6. "Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
7. "Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
8. "She always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
9. "The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
10. "Those who make some other person their job... are dangerous." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
11. "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." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
12. "She couldn't have found anything nastier to say if she had thought it out with both hands for a fortnight." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
13. "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." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
14. "See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
15. "What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: "You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls"; if the answer is, "But I don't," there is no more to be said." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
16. "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. We have efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him "meek and mild" and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
17. "Pray silence for the soloist. But let him be soon over, that we may hear the great striding fugue again." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
18. "If God made everything, did He make the Devil?' This is the kind of embarrassing question which any child can ask before breakfast, and for which no neat and handy formula is provided in the Parents' Manual…Later in life, however, the problem of time and the problem of evil become desperately urgent, and it is useless to tell us to run away and play and that we shall understand when we are older. The world has grown hoary, and the questions are still unanswered." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
19. "I say, I don't think the human frame is very thoughtfully constructed for this sleuthhound business. If one could go on all fours, or had eyes in ones knees, it would be a lot more practical'… ‘What luck! Here's a deep, damp ditch on the other side, which I shall now proceed to fall into.' A slithering crash proclaimed that he had carried out his intention." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
20. "And you, Mary, if you must run off to London, why do it in that unfinished manner, so that I was left without the car, and couldn't catch anything until the midnight train at Northallerton? It's so much better to do things neatly and properly, even stupid things." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
21. "In the terms in which you set it, the problem is unanswerable; but in the Kingdom of Heaven, those terms do not apply. You have asked the question in a form that is much too limited; the 'solution' must be brought in from outside your sphere of reference altogether." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
22. "To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems…which he has to solve…And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of—such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilized amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity….Perhaps the first thing he can learn form the artists is that the only way of 'mastering' one's material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
23. "At twenty years of age, the old-fashioned schooling turned me out helpless, ignorant and dissatisfied. Forty years later I encounter the product of the new schooling — still more helpless, still more ignorant, and possibly not even dissatisfied." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
24. "The banks of the Thirty-Foot held, but the swollen Wale, receiving the full force of the Upper Waters and the spring tide, gave at every point. Before the cars reached St. Paul, the flood was rising and pursuing them. Wimsey's car--the last to start--was submerged to the axles. They fled through the dusk, and behind and on their left, the great silver sheet of water spread and spread." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
25. "I always said the professional advocate was the most amoral person on the face of the earth. I'm certain of it now." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
26. "He had outlived the luxurious agonies of youthful blood, and in this very freedom from illusion he recognised the loss of something. From now on, every hour of light-heartedness would be, not a prerogative but an achievement - one more axe or case-bottle or fowling-piece, rescued, Crusoe-fashion, from a sinking ship." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
27. "Peter:Harriet: Hullo!Peter: I just wanted to ask whether you'd given any further thought to that suggestion about marrying me.Harriet (sarcastically) : I suppose you were thinking how delightful it would be to go through life together like this?Peter: Well, not quite like this. Hand in hand was more my idea.Harriet: What is that in your hand?Peter: A dead starfish.Harriet: Poor fish!Peter: No ill-feeling, I trust.Harriet: Oh, dear no." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
28. "By teaching them all 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." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
29. "My dear child, you can give it a long name if you like, but I'm an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it's so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
30. "A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
31. "(One character on another:)"Don't you know that I passionately dote on every chin on his face?" ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
32. "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." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
33. "this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
34. "Nothing goes so well with a hot fire and buttered crumpets as a wet day without and a good dose of comfortable horrors within. The heavier the lashing of the rain and the ghastlier the details, the better the flavour seems to be." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
35. "And by the way, my dear,' he said, 'you might just mention to Mrs. Sutton that if she must read the morning paper before I come down, I should be obliged if she would fold it neatly afterwards.''What an old fuss-box you are, darling,' said his wife.Mr. Mummery sighed. He could not explain that it was somehow important that the morning paper should come to him fresh and prim, like a virgin.Women did not feel these things. ("Suspicion")" ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
36. "That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
37. "I took the liberty of ascertaining as much beforehand, my lord.""Of course you did, Bunter. You always ascertain everything." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
38. "Wonder whether Mussolini's mother spanked him too much or too little--you never know, these psychological days. Can distinctly remember spanking Peter, but it doesn't seem to have warped him much, so psychologists very likely all wrong." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
39. "I say--I've thought of a good plot for a detective story.""Really?""Top--hole. You know, the sort that people bring out and say 'I've often thought of doing it myself, if only I could find time to sit down and write it.' I gather that sitting down is all that is necessary for producing masterpieces." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
40. "If it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
41. "Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?""So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
42. "What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?" ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
43. "Still, it doesn't do to murder people, no matter how offensive they may be." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
44. "She reflected she must be completely besotted with Peter, if his laughter could hallow an aspidistra." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
45. "If anybody does marry you it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
46. "Listen, Harriet. I do unterstand. I know you don't want either to give or to take ... You don't want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person.""That's true. That's the truest thing you ever said.""All right. I can respect that. Only you've got to play the game. Don't force an emotional situation and then blame me for it.""But I don't want any situation. I want to be left in peace." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
47. "Salcombe Hardy groaned: "How long, O Lord, how long shall we have to listen to all this tripe about commercial arsenic? Murderers learn it now at their mother's knee." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
48. "Even idiots ocasionally speak the truth accidentally." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
49. "We shall know what things are of overmastering importance when they have overmastered us." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
50. "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." ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
First«123»Last

Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes Pictures

Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes
Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes
Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

Today's Quote

I use music as therapy. Whenever I'm feeling angry or needing some 'me' time, which is quite regularly, I'll go and bang a piano or flesh out something on a guitar."
Author: Arthur Darvill

What Did Dorothy L. Sayers Talk About?

Thin
Ear
Wit
Here
Per
She
Able
Thou
Use
Con
Said
Era
Ally
Hey
Son
Ten
Act
King
Sin
Hen
End
Old
Lit
Tan
Though
Ought
Hear
Hum
Ways
Lie
Seem
Ring
Tell
Self
Rain
Cat
Lord
Woman
Hall
Heart
Read
Bee
Mind
Fact
Ours
Call
Owe
Rate
Mother
Brain

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Copyright © 2023 Top Famous Quotes. All Rights Reserved. | New Quotes | Topic List | Author List | Privacy Policy | About Us | Contact Us |