Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

365 Sourced Quotes

There is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps.

Arthur Conan Doyle
You know how often the turning down this street or that, the accepting or rejecting of an invitation, may deflect the whole current of our lives into some other channel. Are we mere leaves, fluttered hither and thither by the wind, or are we rather, with every conviction that we are free agents, carried steadily along to a definite and pre-determined end?

Arthur Conan Doyle
Any one of the larger carnivorous dinosaurs would meet the case. Among them are to be found all the most terrible types of animal life that have ever cursed the earth or blessed a museum.

Arthur Conan Doyle
On general principles, it is best that I should not leave the country. Scotland Yard feels lonely without me, and it causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes.

Arthur Conan Doyle
You have erred perhaps in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements, instead of confiding yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing.

Arthur Conan Doyle
If the aim of physical theories is to explain experimental laws, theoretical physics is not an autonomous science; it is subordinate to metaphysics.

Arthur Conan Doyle
In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as Assistant Surgeon.

Arthur Conan Doyle
No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done.

Arthur Conan Doyle
He foresaw that she would be very much more useful to him in the character of a free woman.

Arthur Conan Doyle
As a rule, when I have heard some slight indication of the course of events, I am able to guide myself by the thousands of other similar cases which occur to my memory. In the present instance I am forced to admit that the facts are, to the best of my belief, unique.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud stains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.

Arthur Conan Doyle
The rain had ceased at last, and a sickly autumn sun shone upon a land which was soaked and sodden with water. Wet and rotten leaves reeked and festered under the foul haze which was soaked and sodden with water. The fields were spotted with monstrous fungi of a size and colour never matched before - scarlet and mauve and liver and black.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Still, it is an error to argue in front of your data. You can find yourself insensibly twisting them round to suit your theories.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Perhaps when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simple one is at hand.

Arthur Conan Doyle
All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience.

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
You will ruin no more lives as you ruined mine. You will wring no more hearts as you wrung mine. I will free the world of a poisonous thing. Take that, you hound, and that! - and that! - and that! - and that!

Arthur Conan Doyle
You reasoned it out beautifully, I exclaimed in unfeigned admiration. It is so long a chain, and yet every link rings true.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Is it not? Is it not? Breadth of view, my dear Mr. Mac, is one of the essentials of our profession. The interplay of ideas and the oblique uses of knowledge are often of extraordinary interest.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Take time to consider. The smallest point may be the most essential.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Knowledge of Geology — Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.

Arthur Conan Doyle
I have already explained to you that what is out of the common is usually a guide rather than a hindrance.

Arthur Conan Doyle
It is the small men and not the great who hold their noses in the air.

Arthur Conan Doyle
And now, Doctor, perhaps you would kindly attend to my thumb, or rather to the place where my thumb used to be.

Arthur Conan Doyle
A formidable array of bottles and test-tubes, with the pungent cleanly smell of hydrochloric acid, told me that he had spent his day in the chemical work which was so dear to him. "Well, have you solved it?" I asked as I entered. "Yes. It was the bisulphate of baryta."

Arthur Conan Doyle
The more outre' and grotesque an incident is the more carefully it deserves to be examined, and the very point which appears to complicate a case is, when duly considered and scientifically handled, the one which is most likely to elucidate it.

Arthur Conan Doyle
"My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere."

Arthur Conan Doyle
And once again Mr. Sherlock Holmes is free to devote his life to examining those interesting little problems which the complexity of human life so pletifuly presents.

Arthur Conan Doyle
I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Man, it's Witchcraft! Where in the name of all that is wonderful did you get those names?

Arthur Conan Doyle