Dorothy L. Sayers (1893 – 1957)
Renowned British author, translator, student of classical and modern languages, and Christian humanist.
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. - Lord Peter Wimsey
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.
If anybody does marry you it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle. - Harriet Vane
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)
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.
Books...are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development. - Lord Peter Wimsey
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. - Lord Peter Wimsey to Harriet Vane, now his wife
Trouble shared is trouble halved. - Lord Peter Wimsey
Everybody suspects an eager desire to curry favour, but rudeness, for some reason, is always accepted as a guarantee of good faith. The only man who ever managed to see through rudeness was Saint Augustine. - Lord Peter Wimsey
The worst sin - perhaps the only sin - passion can commit, is to be joyless.
You don't need an argument for buying butter. It's a natural, human instinct. - Mr. Ingleby
He dogs my footsteps with the incompetent zeal of fifty Watsons. - Lord Peter Wimsey
I always said the professional advocate was the most amoral person on the face of the earth. I'm certain of it now. - Lord Peter Wimsey
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.
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.
...the biggest obstacle to good advertising is the client. - Mr. Hankin
Wait a second... I'm not sure that you haven't said something useful and important. - Lord Peter Wimsey
What’s the damn good of it, Wimsey? A man goes and fights for his country, gets his inside gassed out, and loses his job, and all they give him is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph once a year and paying four shillings in the pound income-tax. - George Fentiman
We don't want to make large and ignominious public mistakes. - Charles Parker
My old mother always used to say, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you stare them in the face hard enough, they generally run away. - Bunter