Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable, which makes you see something you weren't noticing, which makes you see something that isn't even visible.

I saw more than I can tell / And I understood more than I saw.

You must think. The eye is not enough; it needs to think as well.

The brain is the citadel of sense perception.

Unlike Elise, who could discover parts of a person they didn't even know were absent, you specialized in tangible, but that, I feared, was only a matter of time.

Everything inspires me; sometimes I think I see things others don’t.

The eye sees more than the heart knows.

Show Holmes a drop of water and he would deduce the existence of the Atlantic. Show it to me and I would look for a tap. That was the difference between us.

You might see nothing in him. I see everything in him.

Eyesight should learn from reason.

But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile.

A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.

The world is speaking to you every day, you just don't know how to listen.

Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?

It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers - and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.

Owl hasn't exactly got Brain, but he Knows Things.

The highest exercise of imagination is not to devise what has no existence, but rather to perceive what really exists, though unseen by the outward eye-not creation, but insight.

To see is to think, and to think is to see.

You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for.

I don't believe in intuition. When you get sudden flashes of perception, it is just the brain working faster than usual. But you've been getting ready to know it for a long time, and when it comes, you feel you've known it always.

The eye should learn to listen before it looks.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

Consciousness of a fact is not knowing it: if it were, the fish would know more of the sea than the geographers and the naturalists.