Dorothy L. Sayers famous quotes
Last updated: Jul 22, 2024
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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.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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 -
I love you - I am at rest with you - I have come home.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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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.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
A human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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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 -
It is not the business of the church to adapt Christ to men, but men to Christ.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
If men will not understand the meaning of judgement, they will never come to understand the meaning of grace.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
What? Sunday morning in an English family and no sausages? God bless my soul, what's the world coming to, eh?
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
[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.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
[W]hen I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can't find it heroic, or kind, or anything but pretty rotten and feeble.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
The artist's knowledge of his own creative nature is often unconscious; he pursues his mysterious way of life in a strange innocence.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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I have never regretted Paradise Lost since I discovered that it contained no eggs-and-bacon.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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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 -
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.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
Unless we do change our whole way of thought about work, I do not think we shall ever escape from the appalling squirrel-cage of economic confusion in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon Envy and Avarice. 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 -
Birth is beastly - and death - and digestion, if it comes to that. Sometimes when I think of what's happening inside me to a beautiful suprème de sole, with the caviare in boats, and the croûtons and the jolly little twists of potato and all the gadgets - I could cry. But there it is, don't you know.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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... to mention honor was to suggest its opposite.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
Britain possesses no climate, only weather.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
Well-bred English people never have imagination ...
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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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.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
Forgiveness is the one unpardonable sin.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
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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.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers -
Variety, individuality, peculiarity, eccentricity and indeed crankiness are agreeable to the British mind; they make life more interesting.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers
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