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

"Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!"

"Very dangerous things, theories."

"You're thinking that people don't keep up old jealousies for twenty years or so. Perhaps not. Not just primitive, brute jealousy. That means a word and a blow. But the thing that rankles is hurt vanity. That sticks. Humiliation. And we've all got a sore spot we don't like to have touched."

"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."

"A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity."

"If God made everything, did He make the Devil?' This is the kind of embarrassing question which any child can ask before breakfast, and for which no neat and handy formula is provided in the Parents' Manual. Later in life, however, the problem of time and the problem of evil become desperately urgent, and it is useless to tell us to run away and play and that we shall understand when we are older. The world has grown hoary, and the questions are still unanswered."

"I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them."

"What we make is more important than what we are particularly if making is our profession."

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

"He was being about as protective as a can-opener."

"The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit."

"A continual atmosphere of hectic passion is very trying if you haven't got any of your own."

"It's disquieting to reflect that one's dreams never symbolize one's real wishes, but always something Much Worse... If I really wanted to be passionately embraced by Peter, I should dream of dentists or gardening. I wonder what unspeakable depths of awfulness can only be expressed by the polite symbol of Peter's embraces?"

"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."

"The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things."

"The rest were nondescript, as yet undifferentiated-yet nondescripts, thought Harriet, were the most difficult of all human beings to analyze. You scarcely knew they were there, until-bang! Something quite unexpected blew up like a depth charge and left you marveling, to collect strange floating debris."

"Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age."

"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."

"Nothing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature."

"The only Christian work is good work well done."

"Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it."

"Trouble shared is trouble halved."

"A continued atmosphere of hectic passion is very trying if you haven't got any of your own."

"If it were not for the war, this war would suit me down to the ground."

"A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought."

"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."

"Forgiveness does not wipe away the consequences of the sin. The consequences are borne by somebody."

"Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away."

"What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: "You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls"; if the answer is, "But I don't," there is no more to be said."

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

"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."

"For God's sake, let's take the word 'possess' and put a brick round its neck and drown it ... We can't possess one another. We can only give and hazard all we have."

"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."

"Those who make some other person their job... are dangerous."

"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."

"I looked for any footmarks of course, but naturally, with all this rain, there wasn't a sign. Of course, if this were a detective story, there'd have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning, but this being real life in a London November, you might as well expect footprints in Niagara. I searched the roofs right along-and came to the jolly conclusion that any person in any blessed flat in the blessed row might have done it."

"One can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account."

"And upon his return, Gherkins, who had always considered his uncle as a very top-hatted sort of person, actually saw him take from his handkerchief-drawer an undeniable automatic pistol.It was at this point that Lord Peter was apotheosed from the state of Quite Decent Uncle to that of Glorified Uncle."

"You cannot do good work if you take your mind off the work to see how the community is taking it."

"If it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort."

"Some people's blameless lives are to blame for a good deal."

"The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it."

"That a work of creation struggles and insistently demands to be brought into being is a fact that no genuine artist would think of denying."

"Oh, well, faint heart never won so much as a scrap of paper."

"The worst sin-perhaps the only sin- passion can commit is to be joyless."

"When 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."

"Parker looked distressed. He had confidence in Wimsey's judgment, and, in spite of his own interior certainty, he felt shaken."My dear man, where's the flaw in [this case]?""There isn't one ... There's nothing wrong about it at all, except that the girl's innocent."

"Persons curious in chronology may, if they like, work out from what they already know of the Wimsey family that the action of the book takes place in 1935; but if they do, they must not be querulously indignant because the King's Jubilee is not mentioned, or because I have arranged the weather and the moon's changes to suit my own fancy. For, however realistic the background, the novelist's only native country is Cloud-Cuckooland, where they do but jest, poison in jest: no offence in the world."

"I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid."