Dorothy L. Sayers Men Quotations

Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.

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.

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 ...

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

I have never yet heard any middle-aged man or woman who worked with his or her brains express any regret for the passing of youth.

To foment grievance and to set men at variance is the trade by which agitators thrive and journalists make money.

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.

The first thing that strikes the careless observer is that women are unlike men. They are 'the opposite sex' - (though why 'opposite' I do not know; what is the 'neighbouring sex'?).

How true it is that men live for Things and women for People!

It is ridiculous to take on a man's job just in order to be able to say that 'a woman has done it - yah!' The only decent reason for tackling a job is that it is your job and you want to do it.

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.

Philip wasn't the sort of man to make a friend of a woman. He wanted devotion. I gave him that. I did, you know. But I couldn't stand being made a fool of. I couldn;t stand being put on probation, like an office-boy, to see if I was good enough to be condescended to. I quite thought he was honest when he said he didn't believe in marriage -- and then it turned out that it was a test, to see whether my devotion was abject enough. Well, it wasn't. I didn't like having matrimony offered as a bad-conduct prize.

But that's men all over ... Poor dears, they can't help it. They haven't got logical minds.

He remembered having said to his uncle (with a solemn dogmatism better befitting a much younger man): "Surely it is possible to love with the head as well as the heart." Mr. Delagardie had replied, somewhat drily: "No doubt; so long as you do not end by thinking with your entrails instead of your brain.

Once lay down the rule that the job comes first and you throw that job open to every individual, man or woman, fat or thin, tall or short, ugly or beautiful, who is able to do that job better than the rest of the world.

There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man, and by behaving in conformity with which, man may enjoy his true freedom.

[W]hen I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can't find it heroic, or kind, or anything but pretty rotten and feeble.

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.

The dogma of the Incarnation is the most dramatic thing about Christianity, and indeed, the most dramatic thing that ever entered the mind of man; but if you tell people so, they stare at you in bewilderment.

A woman fit to be a man's wife is too good to be his servant.

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

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.

Every great man has a woman behind him ... And every great woman has some man or other in front of her, tripping her up.

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

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 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.