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.
There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.
In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair. . . the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.
God wastes nothing - not even sin. The soul that has struggled and come through is enriched by it's experiences, and Grace does not merely blot out the evil past but in the most literal sense "makes it good. "
It is said that love and a cough cannot be hid.
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.
Every great man has a woman behind him. . . And every great woman has some man or other in front of her, tripping her up.
But you see, I can believe a thing without understanding it. It's all a matter of training.
There is also one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or other, been taught. Even if we learned nothing-perhaps in particular if we learned nothing-our contribution to the discussion may have a potential value.
And heresy is, as I have tried to show, largely the expression of opinion of the untutored average man, trying to grapple with the problems of the universe at the point where they begin to interfere with his daily life and thought.
Learning and literature have a way of outlasting the civilization that made them.
Except ye become as little children, except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, "ye cannot enter the kingdom of God. " One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.
That there is a secret itself is a secret.
[Did you] ever know a sincere emotion to express itself in a subordinate clause?
The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.
To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems. . . which he has to solve. . . And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of-such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilized amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity. . . . Perhaps the first thing he can learn form the artists is that the only way of 'mastering' one's material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant.
There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
I'm getting very old and my bones ache. My sins are deserting me, and if I could only have my time over again I'd take care to commit more of them.
To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.
No share-pusher could vend his worthless stock, if he could not count on meeting, in his prospective victim, an unscrupulous avarice as vicious as his own, but stupider. Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.