Dorothy L. Sayers
A human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.Collection: Nuisance
People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.Collection: Religious
You cannot do good work if you take your mind off the work to see how the community is taking it.Collection: Community
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.Collection: Mother
The rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed ... or find a still greater man to marry her. ... The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all.Collection: Sweet
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.Collection: Men
One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.Collection: Turning 50
The doctrine of hell is not "mediaeval priestcraft" for frightening people into giving money to the church: it is Christ's deliberate judgment on sin.... We cannot repudiate hell without altogether repudiating Christ.Collection: Giving Money
The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.Collection: Integrity
There is only one kind of wisdom that has any social value, and that is the knowledge of one's own limitations.Collection: Social Values
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.Collection: Jobs
The Devil is a spiritual lunatic, but, like many lunatics, he is extremely plausible and cunning.Collection: Spiritual
The Devil ... is much better served by exploiting our virtues than by appealing to our lower passions; consequently, it is when the Devil looks most noble and reasonable that he is most dangerous.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Wall
Learning and literature have a way of outlasting the civilization that made them.Collection: Knowledge
Even idiots ocasionally speak the truth accidentally.Collection: Idiot
When cats sat staring into the fire they were thinking out problems.Collection: Cat
Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath they feed a hunger for justice ... you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living.Collection: Fun
Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader? Do you promise to observe seemly moderation in the use of gangs, conspiracies, Super Criminals and Lunatics and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to science? Will you honor the King's English? ... If you fail to keep your promise, may other writers steal your plots and your pages swarm with misprints.Collection: Kings
A woman fit to be a man's wife is too good to be his servant.Collection: Men
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!Collection: Dragons
Praise God (or whatever it is) from (if direction exists) whom (if personality exists) all blessings (if that word corresponds to any percept of objective reality) flow (if Heraclitus and Bergson and Einstein are correct in stating that everything is more or less flowing about).Collection: Blessing
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.Collection: Love
The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realize the deadliness of principles.Collection: Principles
First I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense inn it.Collection: Faith
Perhaps [the critics are right and] the drama is played out now and Jesus is safely dead and buried. Perhaps. It is ironical and entertaining to consider that at least once in the world's history those words might have been said with complete conviction, and that was on the eve of the Resurrection.Collection: Jesus
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.Collection: Passion
If people will bring dynamite into a powder factory, they must expect explosions.Collection: People
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.Collection: People
Some people's blameless lives are to blame for a good deal.Collection: People
He was so crooked, you could have used his spine for a safety-pin.Collection: Sarcastic
A person who tells a secret, swearing the recipient to secrecy in turn, is asking of the other person a discretion which he is abrogating himself.Collection: Secret
We cannot really look at the movement of the Spirit, just because It is the Power by which we do the looking.Collection: Looks
I have never yet heard any middle-aged man or woman who worked with his or her brains express any regret for the passing of youth.Collection: Regret
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.Collection: Girl
[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.Collection: Real
What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.Collection: Class
Unless we do change our whole way of thought about work, I do not think we shall ever escape from the appalling squirrel-cage of economic confusion in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon Envy and Avarice. A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste.Collection: Work
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.Collection: Mother
To make a precise scientific description of reality out of words is like trying to build a rigid structure out of pure quicksilver.Collection: Reality
[T]he more clamour we make about 'the women's point of view', the more we rub it into people that the women's point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is -- at least in my job. The line I always want to take is, that there is the 'point of view' of the reasonably enlightened human brain, and that this is the aspect of the matter which I am best fitted to uphold.Collection: Jobs
I think the most joyous thing in life is to loaf around and watch another bloke do a job of work. Look how popular are the men who dig up London with electric drills. Duke's son, cook's son, son of a hundred kings, people will stand there for hours on end, ear drums splitting. Why? Simply for the pleasure of being idle while watching other people work.Collection: Kings
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.Collection: Memories
She couldn't have found anything nastier to say if she had thought it out with both hands for a fortnight.Collection: Hands
I entirely agree that a historian ought to be precise in detail; but unless you take all the characters and circumstances into account, you are reckoning without the facts. The proportions and relations of things are just as much facts as the things themselves.Collection: Character
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.Collection: People
That you cannot have Christian principles without Christ is becoming increasingly clear, because their validity as principles depends on Christ's authority.Collection: Christian
Still, it doesn't do to murder people, no matter how offensive they may be.Collection: People