Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. SayersRead
But if it ever occurs to people to value the honor of the mind equally with the honor of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort — and very different from the kind that is being made at the moment.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote advocates for valuing intellectual integrity as much as physical honor, suggesting that such a shift could lead to a profound societal change.
Dorothy L. Sayers emphasizes the importance of valuing mental and intellectual honor on par with physical honor. She asserts that if society prioritizes the honor of thought and intellect, it could spark a revolutionary change that differs significantly from the current social movements, potentially leading to a more enlightened and respectful culture.
Themes
HonorMindBodySocial RevolutionIntellectSociety
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech addressing the balance of education and physical training.
More from Dorothy L. Sayers
All quotes →But suppose one doesn't quite know which one wants to put first. Suppose," said Harriet, falling back on words which were not her own, "suppose one is cursed with both a heart and a brain?" "You can usually tell," said Miss de Vine, "by seeing what kind of mistakes you make. I'm quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. In my opinion, that is.
Dorothy L. SayersRead
. . . the fellow's got a bee in his bonnet. Thinks God's a secretion of the liver--all right once in a way, but there's no need to keep on about it. There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.
Dorothy L. SayersRead
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.
Dorothy L. SayersRead
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. SayersRead
What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.
Dorothy L. SayersRead
Similar quotes
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
H. L. MenckenRead
Humanity's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.
Terry PratchettRead
I take it that 'gentleman' is a term that only describes a person in his relation to others; but when we speak of him as 'a man,' we consider him not merely with regard to his fellow-men, but in relation to himself,--to life--to time--to eternity.
Elizabeth GaskellRead
The ultimate purpose of religious life is to make this evolution move in a direction far more important to the destiny of the ego than the moral health of the social fabric which forms his present environment.
Muhammad IqbalRead
The future doesn't exist. The only thing that exists is now and our memory of what happened in the past. But because we invented the idea of a future, we're the only animal that realized we can affect the future by what we do today.
David SuzukiRead
But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.
Marcel ProustRead