Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

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

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Sarcastic, Safety Pins, Used

  Dorothy L. Sayers (2012). “The Nine Tailors”, p.249, Open Road Media

  12 Copy quote

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

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Principles, Realizing, Middle

  Dorothy L. Sayers (2012). “Gaudy Night”, p.541, Open Road Media

  6 Copy quote

• It was left for the present age to endow Covetousness with glamour on a big scale, and to give it a title which it could carry like a flag. It occurred to somebody to call it Enterprise. From the moment of that happy inspiration, Covetousness has gone forward and never looked back.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Business, Inspiration, Giving

  10 Copy quote

• Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of thinking and living bring about intolerable situations ... the root causes of conflict are usually to be found in some wrong way of life in which all parties have acquiesced, and for which everybody must, to some extent, bear the blame.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  War, Party, Thinking

  6 Copy quote

• The business of the artist is not to escape from his material medium or bully it, but to serve it; but to serve it, he must love it. If he does so, he will realise that in its service is perfect freedom.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Art, Perfect, Bully

  Dorothy L. Sayers (2010). “Mind of the Maker”, p.53, Bloomsbury Publishing

  12 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Secret, Asking, Secrecy

  Dorothy L. Sayers, Jill Paton Walsh (1999). “Thrones, Dominations”, p.102, Macmillan

  9 Copy quote

• [N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Real, Book, Mind

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Girl, Dolls, Peculiar

  7 Copy quote

• There is something about wills which brings out the worst side of human nature. People who under ordinary circumstances are perfectly upright and amiable, go as curly as corkscrews and foam at the mouth, whenever they hear the words 'I devise and bequeath.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  People, Ordinary, Foam

  DOROTHY L. SAYERS (1963). “STRONG POISON”

  9 Copy quote

• I entirely agree that a historian ought to be precise in detail; but unless you take all the characters and circumstances into account, you are reckoning without the facts. The proportions and relations of things are just as much facts as the things themselves.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Character, Details, Facts

  11 Copy quote

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

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Looks, Movement, Spirit

  Dorothy L. Sayers (2010). “Mind of the Maker”, p.91, Bloomsbury Publishing

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Memories, Doe, Gone

  Dorothy L. Sayers (2012). “Gaudy Night”, p.83, Open Road Media

  54 Copy quote

• There are times when one is tempted to say that the great, sprawling, lethargic sin of Sloth is the oldest and greatest of the sins and the parent of all the rest.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Parent, Sloth, Sin

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Mother, Book, Writing

  Dorothy L. Sayers (2013). “The Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries: Whose Body?, Clouds of Witness, and Unnatural Death”, p.408, Open Road Media

  19 Copy quote

• I think the most joyous thing in life is to loaf around and watch another bloke do a job of work. Look how popular are the men who dig up London with electric drills. Duke's son, cook's son, son of a hundred kings, people will stand there for hours on end, ear drums splitting. Why? Simply for the pleasure of being idle while watching other people work.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Kings, Jobs, Son

  23 Copy quote

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

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Class, Individual, Members

  "Are Women Human?" by Dorothy L. Sayers, 1938.

  5 Copy quote

• the truth and value of a theory does not depend on the number of people who are interested in it - otherwise you might compare the number of people who follow the predictions of astrologers in the daily press with those who attend lectures by Einstein, and conclude that astrology was more valuable and true than physics.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Numbers, Astrology, People

  11 Copy quote

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

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Hands, Found, Fortnight

  1937 'Prothalamion'.

  8 Copy quote

• Except ye become as little children, except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, "ye cannot enter the kingdom of God." One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Birthday, Children, Turning 50

  12 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Government, Order, Democracy

  7 Copy quote

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

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  People, May, Matter

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Men, Complaining, Yardsticks

  Dorothy L. Sayers (2010). “Mind of the Maker”, p.19, Bloomsbury Publishing

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Book, Reading, Lobster

  "The Unpleasantness at The Bellona Club". Book by Dorothy L. Sayers, 1928.

  28 Copy quote

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

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Life Death, Solutions

  5 Copy quote

• Have you noticed that the astronomers and mathematicians are much the most cheerful people of the lot? I suppose that perpetually contemplating things on so vast a scale makes them feel either that it doesn't matter a hoot anyway, or that anything so large and elaborate must have some sense in it somewhere.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  People, Cheerful, Matter

  7 Copy quote

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