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The Mind of the Maker The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers
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The Mind of the Maker Quotes Showing 1-30 of 69
“When a job is undertaken from necessity, or from a grim sense of disagreeable duty, the worker is self-consciously aware of the toils and pains he undergoes...But when the job is a labor of love, the sacrifices will present themselves to the worker--strange as it may seem--in the guise of enjoyment. Moralists, looking on at this, will always judge that the former kind of sacrifice is more admirable than the later, because the moralist, whatever he may pretend, has far more respect for pride than for love...I do not mean that there is no nobility in doing unpleasant things from a sense of duty, but only that there is more nobility in doing them gladly out of sheer love of the job.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
tags: god
“To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems…which he has to solve…And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of—such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilized amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity….Perhaps the first thing he can learn form the artists is that the only way of 'mastering' one's material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant. ”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“Our speculations about Shakespeare are almost as multifarious and foolish as our speculations about the maker of the universe, and, like those, are frequently concerned to establish that his works were not made by him but by another person of the same name.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker: The Expression of Faith through Creativity and Art
“In art, the Trinity is expressed in the Creative Idea, the Creative Energy, and the Creative Power—the first imagining of the work, then the making incarnate of the work, and third the meaning of the work.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker: The Expression of Faith through Creativity and Art
“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.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“In the terms in which you set it, the problem is unanswerable; but in the Kingdom of Heaven, those terms do not apply. You have asked the question in a form that is much too limited; the 'solution' must be brought in from outside your sphere of reference altogether.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“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 in edifying miracles though they generally prefer to use them to procure unhappy endings, by which piece of thaumaturgy they win the title of realists.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“The more genuinely creative [the writer] is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“The popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“It will be sent that, although the writer's love is verily a jealous love, it is a jealousy for and not of his creatures. He will tolerate no interference either with them or between them and himself.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“We may properly and profitably amuse ourselves by distinguishing those writers who are respectively 'father-ridden,' 'son-ridden,' and 'ghost-ridden.' It is the mark of the father-ridden that they endeavor to impose the idea directly upon the mind and senses, believing that his is the whole of the work...Among the son-ridden, we may place such writers as Swinburne, in whom the immense ingenuity and sensuous loveliness of the manner is developed out of all proportion to the tenuity of the ruling idea...The ghost-ridden writer, on the other hand, conceives that the emotion which he feels is in itself sufficient to awaken response, without undergoing discipline of a thorough incarnation, and without the coherence that derives from reference to a controlling idea...It may serve as a starting point to say that, whereas failure in the father may be roughly summed up as a failure of thought and a failure in the son is a failure in action, failure in the ghost is a failure in wisdom--not the wisdom of the brain, but the more intimate and instinctive wisdom of the heart and bowels.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity, the more massive the unity. Incidentally, this is the weakness of most “edifying” or “propaganda” literature. There is no diversity. The Energy is active only in one part of the whole, and in consequence the wholeness is destroyed and the Power diminished. You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker: The Expression of Faith through Creativity and Art
“The very act of choosing that one "right" word, automatically and necessarily makes every other word in the dictionary a "wrong" word. The "wrongness" is not inherent in the words themselves -- each of them might be a "right" word in another place* -- their "wrongness" is contingent on the "rightness" of the chosen word. It is the poet who has created the "wrongness" in the act of creating the "rightness."

*Always excepting, of course, words like "sportsdrome" and "normalcy," which are so steeped in sin that no place is "right" for them, except Hell, or a Dictionary of Barbarisms.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“When the laws regulating human society are so formed as to come into collision with the nature of things, and in particular with the fundamental realities of human nature, they will end by producing an impossible situation which, unless the laws are altered, will issue in such catastrophes as war, pestilence and famine. Catastrophes thus caused are the execution of universal law upon arbitrary enactments which contravene the facts; they are thus properly called by theologians, judgments of God.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“if the M.C.C. were to agree, in a thoughtless moment, that the ball must be so hit by the batsman that it should never come down to earth again, cricket would become an impossibility. A vivid sense of reality usually restrains sports committees from promulgating laws of this kind; other legislators occasionally lack this salutary realism.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker: The Expression of Faith through Creativity and Art
“Our minds are not infinite; and as the volume of the world's knowledge increases, we tend more and more to confine ourselves, each to his special sphere of interest and to the specialised metaphor belonging to it. The analytic bias of the last three centuries has immensely encouraged this tendency, and it is now very difficult for the artist to speak the language of the theologian, or the scientist the language of either. But the attempt must be made; and there are signs everywhere that the human mind is once more beginning to move. towards a synthesis of experience.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“we think in a series of metaphors. We can explain nothing in terms of itself, but only in terms of other things. Even mathematics can express itself in terms of itself only so long as it deals with an ideal system of pure numbers; the moment it begins to deal with numbers of things it is forced back into the language of analogy.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“The words of creeds come before our eyes and ears as pictures; we do not apprehend them as statements of experience; it is only when our own experience is brought into relation with the experience of the men who framed the creeds that we are able to say: “I recognise that for a statement of experience; I know now what the words mean.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“The necessary condition for assessing the value of creeds is that we should fully understand that they claim to be, not idealistic fancies, not arbitrary codes, not abstractions irrelevant to human life and thought, but statements of fact about the universe as we know”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“While the parent is wholly responsible for calling the children into being, and can exercise a partial control over their minds and actions, he cannot but recognize the essential independence of the entity that he has procreated. The child’s will is perfectly free; if he obeys his father, he does so through love or fear or respect, but not as an automaton, and the good parent would not wish it otherwise.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker: The Expression of Faith through Creativity and Art
“If all this is true, then it is to the creative artists that we should naturally turn for an exposition of what is meant by those credal formulae which deal with the nature of the Creative Mind. Actually, we seldom seem to consult them in the matter. Poets have, indeed, often communicated in their own mode of expression truths identical with the theologians' truths; but just because of the difference in the modes of expression, we often fail to see the identity of the statements. The artist does not recognise that the phrases of the creeds purport to be observations of fact about the creative mind as such, including his own; while the theologian, limiting the application of the phrases to the divine Maker, neglects to inquire of the artist what light he can throw upon them from his own immediate apprehension of truth.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
tags: truth
“The agents of the miraculous which the novelist has at his command are, roughly speaking, conversion and coincidence;”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“The village that voted the earth was flat doubtless modified its own behavior and its system of physics accordingly, but its vote did not in any way modify the shape of the earth. That remains what it is, whether human beings agree or disagree about it, or even if they never discuss it or take notice of it at all. And if the earth's shape entails consequences for humanity, those consequences will continue to occur, whether humanity likes it or not, in conformity with the laws of nature.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“particularly to those others who have the misfortune to live with him during the period when his Energy is engaged on a job of work. The human maker is, indeed, almost excessively vocal about the perplexities and agonies of creation and the intractability of his material.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“I found myself blushing faintly at the recitation of words so wildly unrelated to anything that the queerest heathen in his blindness was likely to fancy for himself. But critical experience has [121]persuaded me that the Fathers of the Western Church knew more about human nature than I did. So far as the analogy of the human creator goes, their warning is justified.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“The well-meant exhortations of parents and teachers to “write about something you really know about” should be (and will be) firmly ignored by the young creator as yet another instance of the hopeless stupidity of the adult mind. Later in life, and with increased practice in creation, the drive outward becomes so strong that the writer’s whole personal experience can be seen by him objectively as the material for his work.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“Creative Imagination is thus the foe and antidote to fantasy”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“The same thing may be said of Imagination and Fantasy: the personality is the raw material of both; the only difference is in what becomes of it.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
“any passage within a work demands a volume of power appropriate to its place in the unity of that work and no more.[37] But what is important, and not always understood in these days, is that a reminiscent passage of this kind is intended to recall to the reader all the associated passages, and so put him in touch with the sources of power behind and beyond the writer.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

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