Arthur Conan Doyle quotes
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“Ex-Professor Moriarty of mathematical celebrity... is the Napoleon of crime, Watson.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.”
-- Arthur Conan DoyleSource : Arthur Conan Doyle (2013). “The Complete Sherlock Holmes”, p.1117, Race Point Pub
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“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.”
-- Arthur Conan DoyleSource : The Valley of Fear ch. 1 (1915)
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“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
-- Arthur Conan DoyleSource : Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) "Case of Identity"
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“We can't command our love, but we can our actions.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“Where there is no imagination there is no horror.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“My dear Watson," said [Sherlock Holmes], "I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one's self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one's own powers.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“The love of books is among the choicest gifts of the gods.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“I am somewhat exhausted; I wonder how a battery feels when it pours electricity into a non-conductor?”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which set an edge to a man's energy.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”
-- Arthur Conan DoyleSource : Sherlock Holmes in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" (1891).
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“It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“Well, I'm a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“To a great mind, nothing is little,' remarked Holmes, sententiously.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“It's quite exciting," said Sherlock Holmes, with a yawn.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to use all the facts which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclopaedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people do not know.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“The unexpected has happened so continually in my life that it has ceased to deserve the name.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“Watson. Come at once if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“Just as an octopus may have his den in some ocean cave, and come floating out a silent image of horror to attack a swimmer, so I picture such a spirit lurking in the dark of the house which he curses by his presence, and ready to float out upon all whom he can injure.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“Let me run over the principal steps. We approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories. We were simply there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“'There's no need for fiction in medicine,' remarks Foster... 'for the facts will always beat anything you fancy.'”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“My sister and I, you will recollect, were twins, and you know how subtle are the links which bind two souls which are so closely allied.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“No violence, gentlemen — no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture!”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“It is quite a three pipe problem, and I beg that you won't speak to me for fifty minutes.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“I have my own views about Nature's methods, though I feel that it is rather like a beetle giving his”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“The best way of successfully acting a part is to be it.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“My mind rebels at stagnation, give me problems, give me work!”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," he remarked with a smile. "It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“There is nothing more to be said or to be done tonight, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellowmen.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“The man might have died in a fit; but then the jewels are missing," mused the Inspector, "Ha! I have a theory. These flashes come upon me at times... What do you think of this, Holmes? Sholto was, on his own confession, with his brother last night. The brother died in a fit, on which Sholto walked off the treasure! How's that?" "On which the dead man very considerately got up and locked the door on the inside," said Holmes.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“You know how easily and suddenly these things happen, beginning in playful teasing and ending in something a little warmer than friendship. You squeeze the slender arm which is passed through yours, you venture to take the little gloved hand, you say good night at absurd length in the shadow of the door. It is innocent and very interesting, love trying his wings in a first little flutter.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“What a creature he was! Never have I felt such a horse between my knees. His great haunches gathered under him with every stride, and he shot forward ever faster and faster, stretched like a greyhound, while the windbeat in my face and whistled past my ears.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“I carry my own church about under my own hat," said I. "Bricks and mortar won't make a staircase to heaven. I believe with your Master that the human heart is the best temple.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.”
-- Arthur Conan DoyleSource : His Last Bow 'The Adventure of the Red Circle'
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“You are my heart, my life, my one and only thought.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“Come, Watson, come!" he cried. The game is afoot.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.”
-- Arthur Conan DoyleSource : Arthur Conan Doyle (2012). “The Sherlock Holmes Archives (incl. The Truth About Sherlock Holmes)”, p.654, Jazzybee Verlag
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“A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
-- Arthur Conan DoyleSource : "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891)
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“Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“You see, but you do not observe.”
-- Arthur Conan DoyleSource : "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891)
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“Some people's affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”
-- Arthur Conan DoyleSource : Arthur Conan Doyle (2012). “The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - books 1 and 2 (illustrated)”, p.66, The Planet
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“Jealousy is a strange transformer of characters.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”
-- Arthur Conan DoyleSource : Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901).
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“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“If in 100 years I am only known as the man who invented Sherlock Holmes then I will have considered my life a failure.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“It’s every man’s business to see justice done.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“horses: dangerous on both ends and crafty in the middle”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“It is not that I think or believe, but that I know.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“There are times, young fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right and justice, or you never feel clean again.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“What one man can invent, another can discover.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“So it was, my dear Watson, that at two o'clock today I found myself in my old armchair in my own old room, and only wishing that I could have seen my old friend Watson in the other chair which he has so often adorned. - Sherlock Holmes.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“Are you conscious of the restful influence which the stars exert? To me they are the most soothing things in Nature. I am proud to say that I don't know the name of one of them. The glamour and romance would pass away from them if they were all classified and ticketed in one's brain. But when a man is hot and flurried, and full of his own little ruffled dignities and infinitesimal misfortunes, then a star bath is the finest thing in the world.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“Heaven, too, was very near to them in those days. God's direct agency was to be seen in the thunder and the rainbow, the whirlwind and the lightning. To the believer, clouds of angels and confessors, and martyrs, armies of the sainted and the saved, were ever stooping over their struggling brethren upon earth, raising, encouraging, and supporting them.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“As I turned away, I saw Holmes, with his back against a rock and his arms folded, gazing down at the rush of the waters. It was the last that I was ever destined to see of him in this world. - Watson.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“It is always a joy to meet an American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of those who believes that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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“It isn't true that the laws of nature have been capriciously disturbed; that snakes have talked; that women have been turned into salt; that rods have brought water out of rocks.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“Amberley excelled at chess - a mark, Watson, of a scheming mind.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“If the man who observes the myriad stars, and considers that they and their innumerable satellites move in their serene dignity through the heavens, each swinging clear of the other's orbit-if, I say, the man who sees this cannot realise the Creator's attributes without the help of the book of Job, then his view of things is beyond my understanding.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
“Far away on the path we saw Sir Henry looking back, his face white in the moonlight, his hands raised in horror, glaring helplessly at the frightful thing which was hunting him down. But that cry of pain from the hound had blown all our fears to the winds. If he was vulnerable he was mortal, and if we could wound him we could kill him. Never have I seen a man run as Holmes ran that night.”
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
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