Top 15 Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

It pays to advertise! - her best-known slogan for S. H. Benson's, then one of Britain's most prominent advertising firms (Mitzi Brunsdale, Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Berg, 1990, p. 194)

The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables. Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly—but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever came out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth.

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

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.

Somehow or other, and with the best of intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore—and this in the name of one who assuredly never bored a soul in those thirty-three years during which he passed through the world like a flame.

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

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

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.

Many words have no legal meaning. Others have a legal meaning very unlike their ordinary meaning. For example, the word 'daffydown-dilly.' It is a criminal libel to call a lawyer a daffy-down-dilly. Ha! Yes, I advise you never to do such a thing. No, I certainly advise you never to do it.

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.

The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realise the deadliness of principles. (Ch. 21)

Freddie Arbuthnot*: "...mild old gentlemen do sometimes break out into a spot of tut-tuttery."

Harriet Vane: But you say you don't despise those who make some other person their job?
Miss de Vine: Far from despising them, I think they are dangerous.

Lord Peter Wimsey: The worst sin – perhaps the only sin – passion can commit, is to be joyless.

Lord Peter Wimsey: The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it – that is at the bottom of the ψευδῆ λέγειν ὡς δεῖ.