Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

365 Sourced Quotes

It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.

Arthur Conan Doyle
It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.

Arthur Conan Doyle
If you want to write good copy, you must be where the things are.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Several incidents in my life have convinced me of spiritual interposition - of the promptings of some beneficent force outside ourselves, which tries to help us where it can.

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
Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.

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
There seems to me to be absolutely no limit to the inanity and credulity of the human race. Homo Sapiens! Homo idioticus!

Arthur Conan Doyle
I should dearly love that the world should be ever so little better for my presence. Even on this small stage we have our two sides, and something might be done by throwing all one's weight on the scale of breadth, tolerance, charity, temperance, peace, and kindliness to man and beast. We can't all strike very big blows, and even the little ones count for something.

Arthur Conan Doyle
It is quite a three-pipe problem, and I beg that you won't speak to me for fifty minutes.

Arthur Conan Doyle
What the deuce is it to me?" he 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 or to my work.

Arthur Conan Doyle
"What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence", returned my companion, bitterly. "The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done."

Arthur Conan Doyle
"There are one or two elementary rules to be observed in the way of handling patients," he remarked, seating himself on the table and swinging his legs. "The most obvious is that you must never let them see that you want them. It should be pure condescension on your part seeing them at all; and the more difficulties you throw in the way of it, the more they think of it. Break your patients in early, and keep them well to heel."

Arthur Conan Doyle
I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather.

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
If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive.

Arthur Conan Doyle
You are my heart, my life, my one and only thought.

Arthur Conan Doyle
It is all in the way of professional experience. - Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle
In the first year the Income Tax paper arrived and I filled it up to show that I was not liable. They returned the paper with 'Most unsatisfactory' scrawled across it. I wrote 'I entirely agree' under the words, and returned it once more.

Arthur Conan Doyle
We are dealing with an exceptionally astute and dangerous man... one of the most unscrupulous rascals that Australia has ever evolved — and for a young country it has turned out some very finished types.

Arthur Conan Doyle
There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.

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
He is not a bad fellow, though an absolute imbecile in his profession. He has one positive virtue. He is as brave as a bulldog and as tenacious as a lobster if he gets his claws upon anyone.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.

Arthur Conan Doyle
I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of daily life.

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
"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
It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.

Arthur Conan Doyle
The Times is a paper which is seldom found in any hands but those of the highly educated.

Arthur Conan Doyle