Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes (27 Quotes)


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

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

    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.

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

    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.


    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.

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

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

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

    If it were not for the war, this war would suit me down to the ground.

    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.

    The biologist can push it back to the original protist, and the chemist can push it back to the crystal, but none of them touch the real question of why or how the thing began at all. The astronomer goes back untold million of years and ends in gas and emptiness, and then the mathematician sweeps the whole cosmos into unreality and leaves one with mind as the only thing of which we have any immediate apprehension. Cogito ergo sum, ergo omnia esse videntur. All this bother, and we are no further than Descartes. 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.

    There is perhaps 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 afreak.

    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.



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

    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.



    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.

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

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

    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.

    A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

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



    More Dorothy L. Sayers Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Mind - Truth - World - Thought & Thinking - Danger & Risk - Passion - Man - Woman - Books - Pleasure - Work & Career - Home - Future - Experience - Simplicity - Cows - Progress - Age - Mystery - View All Dorothy L. Sayers Quotations

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