Dorothy L. Sayers quotes:

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  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • The only Christian work is good work well done.

  • Well, it seems like a miracle to be able to look forward-to-to see all the minutes in front of one come hopping along with something marvellous in them, instead of just[Pg 295] saying, Well, that one didn't actually hurt and the next may be quite bearable if only something beastly doesn't come pouncing out--

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

  • 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.

  • Very dangerous things, theories.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Once lay down the rule that the job comes first and you throw that job open to every individual, man or woman, fat or thin, tall or short, ugly or beautiful, who is able to do that job better than the rest of the world.

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

  • 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.

  • As we cannot afford to squander our natural resources of minerals, food, and beauty, so we cannot afford to discard any human resources of brains, skills, and initiative, even though it is women who possess them...a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual.

  • 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."

  • make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression.

  • The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly discouraged by Jesus of Nazareth. Not that the Victorians were unique in this respect. Modern writers also indulge in edifying miracles though they generally prefer to use them to procure unhappy endings, by which piece of thaumaturgy they win the title of realists.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?

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

  • She suddenly saw Wimsey in a new light. She knew him to be intelligent, clean, courteous, wealthy, well-read, amusing and enamored, but he had not so far produced in her that crushing sense of inferiority which leads to prostration and hero-worship. But she now realized that there was, after all, something godlike about him. He could control a horse.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • But to Lord Peter the world presented itself as an entertaining labyrinth of side-issues

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

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

  • It's disquieting to reflect that one's dreams never symbolize one's real wishes, but always something Much Worse... If I really wanted to be passionately embraced by Peter, I should dream of dentists or gardening. I wonder what unspeakable depths of awfulness can only be expressed by the polite symbol of Peter's embraces?

  • I am better off with vegetables at the bottom of my garden than with all the fairies of the Midsummer Night's Dream.

  • Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There's yeast in bread, but you can't make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow.

  • Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath they feed a hunger for justice ... you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living.

  • Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader? Do you promise to observe seemly moderation in the use of gangs, conspiracies, Super Criminals and Lunatics and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to science? Will you honor the King's English? ... If you fail to keep your promise, may other writers steal your plots and your pages swarm with misprints.

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

  • Unlike music or poetry or painting, food rouses no response in passionate and emotional youth. Only when the surge of the blood is quieted does gastronomy come into its own with philosophy and theology and the sterner delights of the mind.

  • A human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

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

  • A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

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

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

  • A passage is not plain English - still less is it good English - if we are obliged to read it twice to find out what it means.

  • What we make is more important than what we are, particularly if making is our profession.

  • He was being about as protective as a can-opener.

  • We ought to recognise the profound gulf between the work to which we are 'called' and the work we are forced into as a means of livelihood.

  • People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.

  • If we did not know all His retorts by heart, if we had not taken the sting out of them by incessant repetition in the accents of the pulpit, and if we had not somehow got it into our heads that brains were rather reprehnsible, we should reckon Him among the greatest wits of all time. Nobody else, in three brief years, has achieved such an output of epigram.

  • 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.

  • Even idiots ocasionally speak the truth accidentally.

  • 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.

  • You're thinking that people don't keep up old jealousies for twenty years or so. Perhaps not. Not just primitive, brute jealousy. That means a word and a blow. But the thing that rankles is hurt vanity. That sticks. Humiliation. And we've all got a sore spot we don't like to have touched.

  • 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.

  • 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.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)

  • 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.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)

  • 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.

  • I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid.

  • There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.

  • It's very good of you--""No, no, not at all. It's my hobby. Not proposing to people, I don't mean, but investigating things. Well, cheer-frightfully-ho and all that. And I'll call again, if I may.""I will give the footman orders to admit you," said the prisoner, gravely, "you will always find me at home.

  • 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.

  • Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.

  • 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.

  • My husband would do anything for me ...' It's degrading. No human being ought to have such power over another.""It's a very real power, Harriet.""Then ... we won't use it. If we disagree, we'll fight it out like gentlemen. We won't stand for matrimonial blackmail.

  • 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.

  • At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature!

  • There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

  • A human being must have occupation, of he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

  • Trouble shared is trouble halved.

  • Those who make some other person their job... are 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.

  • 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.

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • It is not the business of the church to adapt Christ to men, but men to Christ.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • [T]he more clamour we make about 'the women's point of view', the more we rub it into people that the women's point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is -- at least in my job. The line I always want to take is, that there is the 'point of view' of the reasonably enlightened human brain, and that this is the aspect of the matter which I am best fitted to uphold.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • To start with invention is the mark of the fertile mind ... and leads later to the interpretation of experience; to start with the reproduction of experience is the infallible index of a barren invention.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • [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.

  • We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served.

  • 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 know what an Act to make things simpler means. It means that the people who drew it up don't understand it themselves and that every one of its clauses needs a law-suit to disentangle it.

  • 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.

  • That there is a secret itself is a secret.

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

  • 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.

  • The only Christian work is good work, well done

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