Top 250 Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

2. “The only Christian work is good work, well done.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

3. “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

4. “Learning and literature have a way of outlasting the civilization that made them.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

Featured in: Quotes About Civilization

5. “Work is not primarily a thing one does to live but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

6. “To know one’s own limitations is the hallmark of competence.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

7. “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

8. “Man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

9. “God wastes nothing – not even sin. The soul that has struggled and come through is enriched by it’s experiences, and Grace does not merely blot out the evil past but in the most literal sense “makes it good.””

— Dorothy L. Sayers

10. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

11. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

12. “Jesus Christ is the only God who has a date in history.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

13. “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!”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

14. “A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

17. “If men will not understand the meaning of judgement, they will never come to understand the meaning of grace.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

18. “Don’t let the smallest chance slip by; you never know until you try.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

19. “If you want your own way, God will let you have it. Hell is the enjoyment of one’s own way forever.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

20. “The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore – on the contrary; they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround Him with an atmosphere of tedium.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

21. “Lord, teach us to take our hearts and look them in the face, however difficult it may be.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

22. “The sin of our times is 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

23. “It is not the business of the church to adapt Christ to men, but men to Christ.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

24. “Advertise, or go under.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

25. “I love you – I am at rest with you – I have come home.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

26. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

28. “To foment grievance and to set men at variance is the trade by which agitators thrive and journalists make money.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

29. “We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

30. “That you cannot have Christian principles without Christ is becoming increasingly clear, because their validity as principles depends on Christ’s authority.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

31. “Forgiveness is the one unpardonable sin.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

32. “I can’t think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one’s grammar. It’s a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I’m afraid.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

33. “A man was taken to the Zoo and shown the giraffe. After gazing at it a little in silence: ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

34. “Trouble shared is trouble halved.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

35. “A woman fit to be a man’s wife is too good to be his servant.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

36. “It is ridiculous to take on a man’s job just in order to be able to say that ‘a woman has done it – yah!’ The only decent reason for tackling a job is that it is your job and you want to do it.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

37. “There’s nothing you can’t prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

38. “Britain possesses no climate, only weather.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

40. “It is the dogma that is the drama – not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death – but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

41. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

42. “He had the appeal of a very young dog of a very large breed – a kind of amiable absurdity.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

44. “I always have a quotation for everything – it saves original thinking.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

45. “There are crimes which the Law cannot reach.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

46. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

47. “You don’t need an argument for buying butter. It’s a natural, human instinct.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

48. “Books, you know, Charles, are like lobster-shells. We surround ourselves with ‘em, and then we grow out of ‘em and leave ’em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

49. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

50. “There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers