Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes - Page 6

Placetne, magistra?" "Placet.

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.

Christendom and heathendom now stand face to face... At bottom is a violent and irreconcilable quarrel about the nature of God and the nature of an and the ultimate nature of the universe; it is a war of dogma.

Sex is every man's loco spot ... he'll take a disappointment, but not a humiliation.

... at no point have I yet found artistic truth and theological truth at variance.

I'm getting very old and my bones ache. My sins are deserting me, and if I could only have my time over again I'd take care to commit more of them.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Advertising never sold a bad product twice.

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

Fantasy works inwards upon its author, blurring the boundary between the visioned and the actual, and associating itself ever moreclosely with the Ego, so that the child who has fantasied himself a murderer ends by becoming a Loeb or a Leopold. The creative Imagination works outwards, steadily increasing the gap between the visioned and the actual, till this becomes the great gulf fixed between art and nature. Few writers of crime-stories become murderers--if any do, it is not the result of identifying themselves with their murderous heroes.

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?" "So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.

All the children seem to be coming out quite intelligent, thank goodness. It would have been such a bore to be the mother of morons, and it’s an absolute toss-up, isn’t it? If one could only invent them, like characters in books, it would be much more satisfactory to a well-regulated mind.

Don't be so damned discouraging," said Wimsey. "I have already carefully explained to you that this time I am investigating this business. Anybody would think you had no confidence in me." "People have been wrongly condemned before now." "Exactly; simply because I wasn't there." "I never thought of that.

There is no solution to death.Life intends to kill us.

Forgiveness is the one unpardonable sin.

Very dangerous things, theories.

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.

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.

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