Top 250 Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The dogma of the Incarnation is the most dramatic thing about Christianity, and indeed, the most dramatic thing that ever entered the mind of man; but if you tell people so, they stare at you in bewilderment.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

52. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

53. “I admit it is better fun to punt than be punted, and that a desire to have all the fun is nine-tenths of the law of chivalry.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

54. “In art, the Trinity is expressed in the Creative Idea, the Creative Energy, and the Creative Power – the first imagining of the work, then the making incarnate of the work, and third the meaning of the work.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

55. “Advertising never sold a bad product twice.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

57. “The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

58. “The business of the artist is not to escape from his material medium or bully it, but to serve it; but to serve it, he must love it. If he does so, he will realise that in its service is perfect freedom.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

59. “When cats sat staring into the fire they were thinking out problems.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

60. “Passion’s a good, stupid horse that will pull the plough six days a week if you give him the run of his heels on Sundays. But love’s a nervous, awkward, over-mastering brute; if you can’t rein him, it’s best to have no truck with him.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

61. “However entrancing it is to wander unchecked through a garden of bright images, are we not enticing your mind from another subject of almost equal importance?”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

62. “Even idiots ocasionally speak the truth accidentally.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

63. “The glass-blower’s cat is bompstable,” said Mr. Parker aloud and distinctly.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

65. “And heresy is, as I have tried to show, largely the expression of opinion of the untutored average man, trying to grapple with the problems of the universe at the point where they begin to interfere with his daily life and thought.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

66. “What? Sunday morning in an English family and no sausages? God bless my soul, what’s the world coming to, eh?”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

67. “The keeping of an idle woman is a badge of superior social status.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

69. “The art of change ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world. To the musical Belgian, for example, it appears that the proper thing to do with a carefully tuned ring of bells is to play a tune upon it. By the English campanologist, the playing of tunes is considered to be a childish game, only fit for foreigners; the proper use of bells is to work out mathematical permutations and combinations.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

71. “The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

72. “In fact, there is perhaps only 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 a freak.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

73. “I do know the worst sin – perhaps the only sin – passion can commit, is to be joyless.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

74. “First I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense inn it.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

75. “Detachment is a rare virtue, and very few people find it lovable, either in themselves or in others. If you ever find a person who likes you in spite of it-still more, because of it-that liking has very great value, because it is perfectly sincere, and because, with that person, you will never need to be anything but sincere yourself.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

76. “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?”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

77. “It is impossible for human nature to believe that money is not there. It seems so much more likely that the money is there and only needs bawling for.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

78. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

79. “The popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

80. “There are many difficulties inherent in a teleological view of creation,” said Parker placidly.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

83. “The mellow bells, soaring and singing in tower and steeple, told of time’s flight through an eternity of peace; and Great Tom, tolling his nightly hundred-and-one, called home only the rooks from off Christ Church Meadow.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

84. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

85. “Nothing is more cruel to the young than to tell them that the world is made for youth.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

86. “It is the first duty of a gentleman to remember in the morning who he went to bed with the night before.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

88. “There is something about wills which brings out the worst side of human nature. People who under ordinary circumstances are perfectly upright and amiable, go as curly as corkscrews and foam at the mouth, whenever they hear the words ‘I devise and bequeath.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

89. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

90. “The Devil is a spiritual lunatic, but, like many lunatics, he is extremely plausible and cunning.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

91. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

92. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

94. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

95. “Everybody is, I suppose, either Classic or Gothic by nature. Either you feel in your bones that buildings should be rectangular boxes with lids to them, or you are moved to the marrow by walls that climb and branch, and break into a inflorescence of pinnacles.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

96. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

97. “I set out in a lordly manner to offer you heaven and earth. I find that all I have to give you is Oxford – which is yours already.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

98. “My brother, being an English gentleman, possesses a library in all his houses, though he never opens a book. This is called fidelity to ancient tradition.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

99. “I am better off with vegetables at the bottom of my garden than with all the fairies of the Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

100. “It’s not the innocent young things that need gentle handling – it’s the ones that have been frightened and hurt.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers