Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

365 Sourced Quotes

"I wonder!" said he, leaning back and staring at the ceiling. "Perhaps there are points which have escaped your Machiavellian intellect. Let us consider the problem in the light of pure reason."

Arthur Conan Doyle
Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.

Arthur Conan Doyle
The sky was of the deepest blue, with a few white, fleecy clouds drifting lazily across it, and the air was filled with the low drone of insects or with a sudden sharper note as bee or bluefly shot past with its quivering, long-drawn hum, like an insect tuning-fork.

Arthur Conan Doyle
I followed you.' I saw no one.' That is what you may expect to see when I follow you.

Arthur Conan Doyle
I am somewhat exhausted; I wonder how a battery feels when it pours electricity into a non-conductor?

Arthur Conan Doyle
His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know nothing.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the inquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Have you tried to drive a harpoon through a body? No? Tut, tut, my dear sir, you must really pay attention to these details.

Arthur Conan Doyle
You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?" "For me," said Sherlock Holmes, "there still remains the cocaine bottle.

Arthur Conan Doyle
The less experienced a doctor is, the higher are his notions of professional dignity...

Arthur Conan Doyle
I said that he was my superior in observation and deduction. If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from an armchair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived. But he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right.

Arthur Conan Doyle
The approach to the offices of Girdlestone and Co. was not a very dignified one, nor would the uninitiated who traversed it form any conception of the commercial prosperity of the firm in question.

Arthur Conan Doyle
"It is no doubt a curious formation," said I "but I am not geologist enough to say that it is wonderful."

Arthur Conan Doyle
Yet birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when one of these harsh facts springs out upon a man at some sudden turn of the path of life, it dashes off for the moment his mask of civilization and gives a glimpse of the stranger and stronger face below.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Was it hardness, was it selfishness, that she should ask me to risk my life for her own glorification? Such thoughts may come to middle age; but never to ardent three-and-twenty in the fever of his first love.

Arthur Conan Doyle
The whole force of the State is at your back if you should need it. I'm afraid that all the queen's horses and all the queen's men cannot avail in this matter.

Arthur Conan Doyle
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
Do you know anything on earth which has not a dangerous side if it is mishandled and exaggerated?

Arthur Conan Doyle
"I find it hard enough to tackle facts, Holmes, without flying away after theories and fancies." "You are right," said Holmes demurely; "you do find it very hard to tackle the facts."

Arthur Conan Doyle
Is he not the celebrated author of the Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it?

Arthur Conan Doyle
If the fresh facts which come to our knowledge all fit themselves into the scheme, then our hypothesis may gradually become a solution.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Science seeks knowledge. Let the knowledge lead us where it will, we still must seek it. To know once for all what we are, why we are, where we are, is that not in itself the greatest of all human aspirations?

Arthur Conan Doyle
"No data yet," he answered. "It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all of the evidence. It biases the judgment.

Arthur Conan Doyle
"But the Solar System!" I protested. "What the deuce is it to me?" [Sherlock Holmes] interrupted impatiently: "You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me."

Arthur Conan Doyle
It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery.

Arthur Conan Doyle
"Not a bird my dear Roxton — not a bird?" "A beast?" "No; a reptile — a dinosaur. Nothing else could have left such a track."

Arthur Conan Doyle
The setting is a worthy one, if the devil did desire to have a hand in the affairs of men.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Too much! Wait till you have lived here longer. Look down the valley! See the cloud of a hundred chimneys that overshadows it! I tell you that the cloud of murder hangs thicker and lower than that over the heads of the people. It is the Valley of Fear, the Valley of Death. The terror is in the hearts of the people from the dusk to the dawn. Wait, young man, and you will learn for yourself.

Arthur Conan Doyle
I have devised seven separate explanations, each of which would cover the facts as far as we know them. But which of these is correct can only be determined by the fresh information which we shall no doubt find waiting for us.

Arthur Conan Doyle
On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic.

Arthur Conan Doyle