Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

“How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.”

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

“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.”

“Some people's blameless lives are to blame for a good deal.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“To subdue one's self to one's own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one's self to other people's ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltness of those dead sea apples.”

“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.”

“Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?"

"So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: I always said the professional advocate was the most amoral person on the face of the earth. I'm certain of it now.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: 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.”

“Sir Impey Biggs: Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.”

“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.”

“Do you know how to pick a lock?"
"Not in the least, I'm afraid."
"I often wonder what we go to school for," said Wimsey.”

“Even idiots ocasionally speak the truth accidentally.”

“For God's sake, let's take the word 'possess' and put a brick round its neck and drown it… We can't possess one another. We can only give and hazard all we have.”

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

“[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.”

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

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

“We shall know what things are of overmastering importance when they have overmastered us.”

“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.

(, 8 September 1935)”

“I gather that he nearly knocked you down, damaged your property, and generally made a nuisance of himself, and that you instantly concluded he must be some relation to me.”

“Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;
If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!”

“He was being about as protective as a can-opener.”

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

“Lord Peter Wimsey: 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“It is said that love and a cough cannot be hid.”

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

“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.

(, 8 September 1935)”

“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.”

“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.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.”

“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.”

“It pays to advertise! - her best-known slogan for S. H. Benson's, then one of Britain's most prominent advertising firms (Mitzi Brunsdale, Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Berg, 1990, p. 194)”

“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. - Lord Peter Wimsey to Harriet Vane, now his wife”

“Mr. Hankin: …the biggest obstacle to good advertising is the client.”

“George Fentiman: What’s the damn good of it, Wimsey? A man goes and fights for his country, gets his inside gassed out, and loses his job, and all they give him is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph once a year and paying four shillings in the pound income-tax.”

“Many words have no legal meaning. Others have a legal meaning very unlike their ordinary meaning. For example, the word 'daffydown-dilly.' It is a criminal libel to call a lawyer a daffy-down-dilly. Ha! Yes, I advise you never to do such a thing. No, I certainly advise you never to do it.”

“Somehow or other, and with the best of intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore—and this in the name of one who assuredly never bored a soul in those thirty-three years during which he passed through the world like a flame.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: Wait a second… I'm not sure that you haven't said something useful and important.
Lady Mary Wimsey: Everything I say is useful and important.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: He dogs my footsteps with the incompetent zeal of fifty Watsons.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: Wherever trouble turns up, there am I at the bottom of it.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: The first thing a principle does — if it really is a principle — is to kill somebody.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: I'm told I make love rather nicely. Though I am at a bit of a disadvantage at the moment. One can't be too convincing at the other end of the table with a bloke looking in the window.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: She has a sense of humor… and brains… life wouldn't be dull. One would wake up, and there would be a whole day full of jolly things to do. And then we would come home and go to bed… and that would be jolly too.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: Everybody suspects an eager desire to curry favour, but rudeness, for some reason, is always accepted as a guarantee of good faith. The only man who ever managed to see through rudeness was Saint Augustine.”

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

“Charles Parker: We don't want to make large and ignominious public mistakes.”

“Bunter: My old mother always used to say, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you stare them in the face hard enough, they generally run away.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: Trouble shared is trouble halved.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: The worst sin - perhaps the only sin - passion can commit, is to be joyless.”

“Miss de Vine: [In response to Harriet Vane's, "But you say you don't despise those who make some other person their job?"] "Far from despising them, I think they are dangerous."”

“The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables. Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly—but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever came out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth.”

“Harriet Vane: If anybody does marry you it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle.”

“Lord Peter Wimsey: It’s my belief most of us would only be too pleased to chuck these community hysterics if the beastly newspapers didn’t run it for all it’s worth. However, it won’t do to say so. (on Remembrance Day observances)”