I know what you're thinking - that anybody with proper sensitive feelings would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feelings should prevent me from doing my proper job.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Categorized in : Thinking Jobs Writing

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.

Dorothy L. Sayers

hate life believe

Work is not primarily a thing one does to live but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.

Dorothy L. Sayers

expression spiritual doe

The popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling.

Dorothy L. Sayers

confused expression thinking

If you want your own way, God will let you have it. Hell is the enjoyment of one's own way forever.

Dorothy L. Sayers

life-changing want forever

God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own ... by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators.

Dorothy L. Sayers

church people jesus

The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man-and the dogma is the drama ... The plot pivots upon a single character, and the whole action is the answer to a single central problem: 'What think ye of Christ?'... He was emphatically not a dull m an in his human lifetime, and if he was God, there can be nothing dull about God either.

Dorothy L. Sayers

christian character drama

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.

Dorothy L. Sayers

effort educational men

Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.

Dorothy L. Sayers

uncontrollable-urge strong-women time

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.

Dorothy L. Sayers

justice people jesus

Man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something.

Dorothy L. Sayers

creating creativity men

It is not the business of the church to adapt Christ to men, but men to Christ.

Dorothy L. Sayers

church christian men

It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe.

Dorothy L. Sayers

feelings people firsts

A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, for such a society is a house built upon sand.

Dorothy L. Sayers

waste house order

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.

Dorothy L. Sayers

evil rose jesus

None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can't teach people that - they have to learn by experience.

Dorothy L. Sayers

true-love wicked people

The trouble is. . .that everybody sneers at restrictions and demands freedom, till something annoying happens; then they demand angrily what has become of the discipline.

Dorothy L. Sayers

demand annoying discipline

Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.

Dorothy L. Sayers

husband mother father

If men will not understand the meaning of judgement, they will never come to understand the meaning of grace.

Dorothy L. Sayers

judgement grace men

Perhaps [the critics are right and] the drama is played out now and Jesus is safely dead and buried. Perhaps. It is ironical and entertaining to consider that at least once in the world's history those words might have been said with complete conviction, and that was on the eve of the Resurrection.

Dorothy L. Sayers

might drama jesus

The rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed ... or find a still greater man to marry her. ... The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all.

Dorothy L. Sayers

greatness sweet men