"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."

"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)"

"A human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world."

"What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person."

"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."

"Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds."

"Many words have no legal meaning. Others have a legal meaning very unlike their ordinary meaning. For example, the word 'daffydown-dilly.' It is a criminal libel to call a lawyer a daffy-down-dilly. Ha! Yes, I advise you never to do such a thing. No, I certainly advise you never to do it."

"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."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it – that is at the bottom of the ψευδῆ λέγειν ὡς δεῖ."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: The worst sin – perhaps the only sin – passion can commit, is to be joyless."

"Harriet Vane: But you say you don't despise those who make some other person their job? Miss de Vine: Far from despising them, I think they are dangerous."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: The first thing a principle does — if it really is a principle — is to kill somebody."

"The art of change-ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world."

"Harriet Vane: I know what you're thinking – that anybody with proper sensitive feeling 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 feeling should prevent me from doing my proper job."

"Freddie Arbuthnot*: "...mild old gentlemen do sometimes break out into a spot of tut-tuttery.""

"Lord Peter Wimsey: 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: He dogs my footsteps with the incompetent zeal of fifty Watsons."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: Wherever trouble turns up, there am I at the bottom of it."

"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."

"Mr. Hankin: ...the biggest obstacle to good advertising is the client."

"The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realise the deadliness of principles. (Ch. 21)"

"Lord Peter Wimsey: I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking."

"Mr. Ingleby: You don't need an argument for buying butter. It's a natural, human instinct."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: Wait a second... I'm not sure that you haven't said something useful and important. Lady Mary Wimsey: Everything I say is useful and important."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: She has a sense of humor... and brains... life wouldn't be dull. One would wake up, and there would be a whole day full of jolly things to do. And then we would come home and go to bed... and that would be jolly too."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: I'm told I make love rather nicely. Though I am at a bit of a disadvantage at the moment. One can't be too convincing at the other end of the table with a bloke looking in the window."

"Harriet Vane: If anybody does marry you it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: It’s my belief most of us would only be too pleased to chuck these community hysterics if the beastly newspapers didn’t run it for all it’s worth. However, it won’t do to say so. (on Remembrance Day observances)"

"To the person who has anything to conceal — to the person who wants to lose his identity as one leaf among the leaves of a forest — to the person who asks no more than to pass by and be forgotten, there is one name above others which promises a haven of safety and oblivion. London. Where no one knows his neighbour. Where shops do not know their customers. Where physicians are suddenly called to unknown patients whom they never see again. Where you may lie dead in your house for months together unmissed and unnoticed till the gas inspector comes to look at the meter. Where strangers are friendly and friends are casual. London, whose rather untidy and grubby bosom is the repository of so many odd secrets. Discreet, incurious and all-enfolding London."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: 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."

"Charles Parker: We don't want to make large and ignominious public mistakes."

"George Fentiman: 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."

"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."

"Sir Impey Biggs: 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."

"Sir Impey Biggs: Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force."

"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."

"Honoria Lucasta, Dowager Duchess of Denver: It's so much better to do things neatly and properly, even stupid things."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: Trouble shared is trouble halved."

"Bunter: 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. Lord Peter Wimsey: Your mother, Bunter? Oh, I never knew you had one. I always thought you just sort of came along already-made, so it were."

"When a man sets out to paint a monumental painting, or to write an epic, men think of and , and vote all such efforts dull and pompous. Certainly it is safer to paint , or write little lyrics exquisitely. But knew that subject counts for a great deal in art. The choice of a subject obviously matters immensely, because no one works well on a subject that does not interest him; and a great subject, though it does not make a feeble treatment of it great is necessary for calling out a man's utmost powers. Resistance in one's material is a fine spur to effort; and many artists have never realised a tenth of their own latent powers till brought to grapple with a subject which perhaps, at the time, utterly defeated them. Now Watts had a natural bent towards imaginative subjects on the heroic plane. Watts was very English ..."

"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them."

"We are living in a time of trouble and bewilderment, in a time when none of us can foresee or foretell the future. But surely it is in times like these, when so much that we cherish is threatened or in jeopardy, that we are impelled all the more to strengthen our inner resources, to turn to the things that have no news value because they will be the same to-morrow that they were to-day and yesterday — the things that last, the things that the wisest, the most farseeing of our race and kind have been inspired to utter in forms that can inspire ourselves in turn."

"Safe were those evenings of the pre-war world When firelight shone on green linoleum, I heard the church bells hollowing out the sky, Deep beyond deep, like never-ending stars."

"The dread of beatings! Dread of being late! And, greatest dread of all, the dread of games!"

"It's strange that those we miss the most Are those we take for granted."

"Within the human world I know Such goings-on could not be so, For human beings only do What their religion tells them to. [...] But all the same it’s strange to me How very full the church can be With people I don’t see at all Except at Harvest Festival."

"Christmas and Easter may be feasts For congregations and for priests, And so may Whitsun. All the same, They do not fill my meagre frame. For me the only feast at all Is Autumn’s Harvest Festival."

"A large and most unfriendly rat Comes in to see what we are at. He says he thinks there is no God And yet he comes... it’s rather odd."

"I am a young executive. No cuffs than mine are cleaner; I have a Slimline brief-case and I use the firm's Cortina."