Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

365 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age.

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
The most dangerous condition for a man or a nation is when his intellectual side is more developed than his spiritual. Is that not exactly the condition of the world today?

Arthur Conan Doyle
Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.

Arthur Conan Doyle
"Iguanodons," said Summerlee. "You'll find their footmarks all over the Hastings sands, in Kent, and in Sussex. The South of England was alive with them when there was plenty of good lush green-stuff to keep them going. Conditions have changed, and the beasts died. Here it seems that the conditions have not changed, and the beasts have lived."

Arthur Conan Doyle
My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Brothers are a blessing for one thing. There is no possibility of any young lady getting unreasonably conceited if she be endowed with them.

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
"Dr. Munro, sir," said he, "I am a walking museum. You could fit what ISN'T the matter with me on to the back of a — visiting card. If there's any complaint you want to make a special study of, just you come to me, sir, and see what I can do for you. It's not every one that can say that he has had cholera three times, and cured himself by living on red pepper and brandy."

Arthur Conan Doyle
I can hardly hope, by the use of scientific language, to convey any sense of my meaning to those ineffectual people who gather their ideas from the columns of a daily newspaper.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Living, as I do, in an educated and scientific atmosphere, I could not have conceived that the first principles of zoology were so little known. Is it possible that you do not know the elementary fact in comparative anatomy, that the wing of a bird is really the forearm, while the wing of a bat consists of three elongated fingers with membranes between?

Arthur Conan Doyle
When you look closely it is a question whether that which is a wrong to the present community may not prove to have been a right to the interests of posterity. That sounds a little foggy; but I will make my meaning more clear when I say that I think right and wrong are both tools which are being wielded by those great hands which are shaping the destinies of the universe, that both are making for improvement; but that the action of the one is immediate, and that of the other more slow, but none the less certain. Our own distinction of right and wrong is founded too much upon the immediate convenience of the community, and does not inquire sufficiently deeply into the ultimate effect.

Arthur Conan Doyle
"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
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
His love of danger, his intense appreciation of the drama of an adventure—all the more intense for being held tightly in—his consistent view that every peril in life is a form of sport, a fierce game betwixt you and Fate, with Death as a forfeit, made him a wonderful companion at such hours.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Holy Men! Holy Cabbages! Holy Bean Pods! What do they do but live and suck in sustenance and grow fat?

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

Arthur Conan Doyle
Let us hear the suspicions. I will look after the proofs.

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
So complex is the human spirit that it can itself scarce discern the deep springs which impel it to action.

Arthur Conan Doyle
'I had,' said he, 'come to an entirely erroneous conclusion which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data.'

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

Arthur Conan Doyle