Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

365 Sourced Quotes

Yes, I have a turn both for observation and for deduction. The theories which I have expressed there, and which appear to you to be so chimerical are really extremely practical - so practical that I depend upon them for my bread and cheese.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
I have heard, Mr. Holmes, that you can see deeply into the manifold wickedness of the human heart.

Arthur Conan Doyle
"Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing," answered Holmes thoughtfully. "It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different."

Arthur Conan Doyle