Dorothy Leigh Sayers (/ˈsɛərz/ ; 13 June 1893 – 17 December 1957) was a renowned English crime writer and poet. She was also a student of classical and modern languages.
A passage is not plain English - still less is it good English - if we are obliged to read it twice to find out what it means.
For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.
She suddenly saw Wimsey in a new light. She knew him to be intelligent, clean, courteous, wealthy, well-read, amusing and enamored, but he had not so far produced in her that crushing sense of inferiority which leads to prostration and hero-worship. But she now realized that there was, after all, something godlike about him. He could control a horse.
It is said that love and a cough cannot be hid.
That you cannot have Christian principles without Christ is becoming increasingly clear, because their validity as principles depends on Christ's authority.
It is the first duty of a gentleman to remember in the morning who he went to bed with the night before.
The first thing a principle does is kill somebody
Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.
The business of the artist is not to escape from his material medium or bully it, but to serve it; but to serve it, he must love it. If he does so, he will realise that in its service is perfect freedom.
What we make is more important than what we are, particularly if making is our profession.
I often think when a man's once past a certain age, the older he grows the tougher he gets, and women the same or more so.
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.
A human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.
If people will bring dynamite into a powder factory, they must expect explosions.
What is the use of acquiring one's heart's desire if one cannot handle and gloat over it, show it to one's friends, and gather an anthology of envy and admiration?
all conscious thought is a process in time; so that to think consciously about Time is like trying to use a foot-rule to measure its own length.
First I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense inn it.
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.
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.