Quotes from Dorothy L. Sayers

the mirror of his own magnanimity.

Mr Weldon grappled for some moments with this surprising piece of logic, but failed to detect either the petitio eleuchi, the undistributed middle or the inaccurate major premiss which is contrived to combine.

In the glamour of one Gaudy night, one could realize that one was a citizen of no mean city. It might be an old and an old-fashioned city, with inconvenient buildings and narrow streets where the passersby squabbled foolishly about the right of way; but her foundations were set upon the holy hills and her spires touched heaven.

They had merely discovered that comfortable and well-fed people are constitutionally disinclined for united action of any sort—a fact which explains the asinine meekness of the income-tax payer.

Mr. Bunter was professionally accustomed to judge human beings by their behavior, not in great crises, but in the minor adjustments of daily life.

It is at this point we begin to understand what St. Hilary means in saying of the Trinity: "Eternity is in the Father, form in the Image and use in the Gift.

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.

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

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

What do we find God 'doing about' this business of sin and evil?...God did not abolish the fact of evil; He transformed it. He did not stop the Crucifixion; He rose from the dead.

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

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

And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? I love you - I am at rest with you - I have come home.

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.

Well-bred English people never have imagination.

The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.

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.

I love you - I am at rest with you - I have come home.

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

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

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

God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own ... by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators.

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.

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