Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes - Page 5

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.

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 true it is that men live for Things and women for People!

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man, and by behaving in conformity with which, man may enjoy his true freedom.

If anybody ever marries you, it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle

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.

There is one vast human experience that confronts us so formidably that we cannot pretend to overlook it. There is no solution to death. There is no means whatever whereby you or I, by taking thought, can solve this difficulty in such a manner that it no longer exists.

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.

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

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

The first thing that strikes the careless observer is that women are unlike men. They are 'the opposite sex' - (though why 'opposite' I do not know; what is the 'neighbouring sex'?).

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.

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

It's very inconvenient being a sculptor. It's like playing the double-bass; one's so handicapped by one's baggage.

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

[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.

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.

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

What is the use of acquiring one's heart's desire if one cannot handle and gloat over it, show it to one's friends, and gather an anthology of envy and admiration?

What the Church should be telling him [the carpenter] is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

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.