Quotes from Dorothy Sayers

Discretion plays a major part in making up the salesman's art, for truths that no one can believe are calculated to deceive.

He had the appeal of a very young dog of a very large breed -- a kind of amiable absurdity.

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.

In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.

... at no point have I yet found artistic truth and theological truth at variance.

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

When the laws regulating human society are so formed as to come into collision with the nature of things, and in particular with the fundamental realities of human nature, they will end by producing an impossible situation which, unless the laws are altered, will issue in such catastrophes as war, pestilence and famine. Catastrophes thus caused are the execution of universal law upon arbitrary enactments which contravene the facts; they are thus properly called by theologians, judgments of God.

As the Head of a woman's college she must, thought Harriet, have had a distasteful task; for she looked as though the word 'compromise' had been omitted from her vocabulary; and all statesmanship is compromise.

What a shocking set of crooks these English servants are! Not even murder will turn them from their feudal devotion to the man who pays!

You may say you won't interfere with another person's soul, but you do—merely by existing. The snag about it is the practical difficulty, so to speak, of not existing.

But it is the mark of all movements, however well-intentioned, that their pioneers tend, by much lashing of themselves into excitement, to lose sight of the obvious.

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.