Top 250 Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “We may argue eloquently that ‘Honesty is the best Policy’ – unfortunately, the moment honesty is adopted for the sake of policy it mysteriously ceases to be honesty.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

102. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

103. “There’s ways and ways of dyin’. Some is took, and some takes French leave, and others is ’elped out of life...”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

104. “You’re thinking that people don’t keep up old jealousies for twenty years or so. Perhaps not. Not just primitive, brute jealousy. That means a word and a blow. But the thing that rankles is hurt vanity. That sticks. Humiliation. And we’ve all got a sore spot we don’t like to have touched.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

105. “February was sobbing and blustering its lachrymose way into March, when she received a letter from the Dean.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

106. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

107. “It was left for the present age to endow Covetousness with glamour on a big scale, and to give it a title which it could carry like a flag. It occurred to somebody to call it Enterprise. From the moment of that happy inspiration, Covetousness has gone forward and never looked back.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

108. “What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

109. “I think my mother’s talents deserve a little acknowledgement. I said so to her, as a matter of fact, and she replied in these memorable words: “My dear child, you can give it a long name if you like, but I’m an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it’s so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

110. “Heroics that don’t come off are the very essence of burlesque.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

111. “So I am a Socialist,” said Ingleby, “but I can’t stand this stuff about Old Dumbletonians. If everybody had the same State education, these things wouldn’t happen.” “If everybody had the same face,” said Bredon, “there’d be no pretty women.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

112. “They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

114. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Dorothy L. Sayers

116. “The first thing a principle does is kill somebody.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

117. “Harriet agreed that intellectual women should marry and reproduce their kind; but she pointed out the English husband had something to say in the matter and that, very often, he did not care for an intellectual wife.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

118. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

119. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

120. “Any fool can tell a lie, and any fool can believe it; but the right method is to tell the truth in such a way that the intelligent reader is seduced into telling the lie for himself.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

121. “Why? Oh, well – I thought you’d be rather an attractive person to marry. That’s all. I mean, I sort of took a fancy to you. I can’t tell you why. There’s no rule about it, you know.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

122. “There’s something hypnotic about the word tea.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

123. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

124. “She always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

125. “It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

126. “To make a precise scientific description of reality out of words is like trying to build a rigid structure out of pure quicksilver.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

127. “Ah, well, as the old pagan said of the Gospels, after all, it was a long time ago, and we’ll hope it wasn’t true.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

128. “If people will bring dynamite into a powder factory, they must expect explosions.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

129. “But you see, I can believe a thing without understanding it. It’s all a matter of training.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

130. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

131. “Duke’s son, cook’s son, son of a hundred kings – people will stand there for hours on end, with their ear-drums splitting – why? Simply for the pleasure of being idle while other people work.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

132. “Something was jigging and worrying in his brain; it felt like a hive of bees, stirred up by a stick.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

133. “Fou!” “Who?” “I didn’t say ‘who’; I said ‘fou,’ ” “I know you did. I said who?” “Who?” “Who’s fou?” “Oh, is. By Jove, ‘suis’! ‘Je suis fou.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

134. “He was so crooked, you could have used his spine for a safety-pin.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

135. “The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realize the deadliness of principles.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

136. “Foster never did anything that was not absolutely correct; this, perhaps, was his real weakness, for it meant that he lacked imagination, both in his work and in handling the men under him.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

137. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

138. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

139. “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.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

140. “A continual atmosphere of hectic passion is very trying if you haven’t got any of your own.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

141. “There’s truth as far as you knows it; and there’s truth as far as you’re asked for it. But they don’t represent the whole truth – not necessarily.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

142. “The artist’s knowledge of his own creative nature is often unconscious; he pursues his mysterious way of life in a strange innocence.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

143. “The rest were nondescript, as yet undifferentiated – yet nondescripts, thought Harriet, were the most difficult of all human beings to analyze. You scarcely knew they were there, until – bang! Something quite unexpected blew up like a depth charge and left you marveling, to collect strange floating debris.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

144. “In the terms in which you set it, the problem is unanswerable; but in the Kingdom of Heaven, those terms do not apply. You have asked the question in a form that is much too limited; the ‘solution’ must be brought in from outside your sphere of reference altogether.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

145. “Plain lies are dangerous.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

146. “Well-bred English people never have imagination...”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

147. “Oh, well, faint heart never won so much as a scrap of paper.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

148. “One demands a little originality in these days, even from murderers,” said Lady Swaffham. “Like dramatists, you know – so much easier in Shakespeare’s time, wasn’t it? Always the same girl dressed up as a man, and even that borrowed from Boccaccio or Dante or somebody. I’m sure if I’d been a Shakespeare hero, the very minute I saw a slim-legged young page-boy I’d have said: ‘Ods bodikins! There’s that girl again!”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

149. “Thank God!’ said Wimsey. ‘Where there is a church, there is civilisation.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

150. “The war has jerked us pretty sharply into consciousness about this slug-a-bed sin of Sloth, and perhaps we need not say too much about it. But two warnings are rather necessary.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers