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

Incidentally, one has to be very careful with that ‘Bridegroom’ imagery. It is so very apt to land one in Male and Female Principles, Eleusis, and the womb of the Great Mother. And that sort...

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

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.

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...

My husband would do anything for me …’ It’s degrading. No human being ought to have such power over another.””It’s a very real power, Harriet.””Then … we won’t use it. If we disagree, we’ll fight...

this is the weakness of most ‘edifying’ or ‘propaganda’ literature. There is no diversity…You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.

The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity the more massive the unity.

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...

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...

Nothing goes so well with a hot fire and buttered crumpets as a wet day without and a good dose of comfortable horrors within. The heavier the lashing of the rain and the ghastlier the...

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...

[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,...

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...

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be...

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...

We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is...

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

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...

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)

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

Lord Peter Wimsey: Facts, Bunter, must have facts. When I was a small boy, I always hated facts. Thought they were nasty, hard things, all nobs. Mervyn Bunter: Yes, my lord. My old mother always...

The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly discouraged by Jesus of Nazareth. Not that the Victorians were unique in this respect. Modern writers also indulge...

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...

She reflected she must be completely besotted with Peter, if his laughter could hallow an aspidistra.

At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature!

Salcombe Hardy groaned: “How long, O Lord, how long shall we have to listen to all this tripe about commercial arsenic? Murderers learn it now at their mother’s knee.

See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind … is the one fundamental treason which the scholar’s mind must not...

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

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...

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do””Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

Lord Peter was hampered in his career as a private detective by a public school education. Despite Parker’s admonitions, he was not always able to discount it. His mind had been warped in its young...

Isn’t the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?””Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it’s dead right, there’s no excitement like it. It’s marvelous. It...

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

People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.

Listen, Harriet. I do unterstand. I know you don’t want either to give or to take … You don’t want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person.””That’s true. That’s the truest...

[On marriage and permanent attachment:]Well, well — the prizes all go to the women who ‘play their cards well’ — but if they can only be won in that way, I would rather lose the...

[I]t’s difficult to make people see that what you have been taught counts for nothing, and that the only things worth having are the things you find out for yourself. Also, that when so many...

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.

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

There is something about wills which brings out the worst side of human nature. People who under ordinary circumstances are perfectly upright and amiable, go as curly as corkscrews and foam at the mouth, whenever...

You’d think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him,” said Miss Hillyard. “It didn’t pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour...

(One character on another:)”Don’t you know that I passionately dote on every chin on his face?

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!

The only Christian work is good work well done.

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.

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...

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...

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

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...