Sayers Sayings

I'm currently reading a collection of essays by Dorothy L. Sayers called The Whimsical Christian. They are Christian apologetics along the line of C. S. Lewis, and like Lewis, Sayers is exceedingly quotable. Here are some good ones from various essays.

On the nature of sacrifice in "What Do We Believe?":

Ask yourself: if there is something you supremely want to do, do you count as self-sacrifice the difficulties encountered or the other possible activities cast aside? You do not. The time when you deliberately say, "I must sacrifice this, that, or the other" is when you do not supremely desire the end in view. At such times you doing your duty, and that is admirable, but it is not love. But as soon as your duty becomes your love the self-sacrifice is taken for granted, and , whatever the world calls it, you call it so no longer.

On human nature (quoting Lord David Cecil) in "Creed or Chaos?":

As Lord David Cecil has said: "The jargon of the philosophy of progress taught us to think that the savage and primitive state of man is behind us, we still talk of the present 'return to barbarism.' But barbarism is not behind us, it is beneath us."

On the role of recognition in true art, from "Toward a Christian Esthetic":

This recognition of the truth that we get in the artist's work comes to us as a revelation of new truth. I want to be clear about that. I am not referring to the sort of patronizing observing: "Yes, yes, very good, very true--that's just what I'm always saying." I mean the recognition of a truth that tells us something about ourselves that we had not been always saying, something that puts a new knowledge of ourselves within our grasp. It is new, startling, and perhaps shattering, and yet it comes to us with a sense of familiarity. We did not know it before, but the moment the poet has shown it to us, we know that, somehow or other, we had always really known it.

Special shout out to Troy and Britt for the book turn-on. Good stuff!