Quotes from Dorothy L. Sayers

How true it is that men live for Things and women for People!

A human being must have occupation, of he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman. But an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any force.

I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.

The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.

Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.

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

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.

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.

Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.

Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age.

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.

That a work of creation struggles and insistently demands to be brought into being is a fact that no genuine artist would think of denying.

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

Every woman is a human being-one cannot repeat that too often-and a human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

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!

The planet's tyrant, dotard Death, had held his gray mirror before them for a moment and shown them the image of things to come.

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

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

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

The trouble is. . .that everybody sneers at restrictions and demands freedom, till something annoying happens; then they demand angrily what has become of the discipline.