Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

365 Sourced Quotes

Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them.

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

Arthur Conan Doyle
From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.

Arthur Conan Doyle
A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the theory of reincarnation.

Arthur Conan Doyle
One dumb-bell, Watson! Consider an athlete with one dumb-bell. Picture to yourself the unilateral development - the imminent danger of a spinal curvature. Shocking, Watson, shocking!

Arthur Conan Doyle
I cannot live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was there ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the streets and drifts across the dun-colored houses.... What is the use of having powers, Doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them?

Arthur Conan Doyle
The more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawning of time.

Arthur Conan Doyle
If my future were black, it was better surely to face it like a man than to attempt to brighten it by mere will-o'-the-wisps of the imagination.

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

Arthur Conan Doyle
Like all Holmes's reasoning the thing seemed simplicity itself when it was once explained.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Strange indeed is human nature. Here were these men, to whom murder was familiar, who again and again had struck down the father of the family, some man against whom they had no personal feeling, without one thought of compunction or of compassion for his weeping wife or helpless children, and yet the tender or pathetic in music could move them to tears.

Arthur Conan Doyle
A trusty comrade is always of use; and a chronicler still more so.

Arthur Conan Doyle
"... the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime." "The dog did nothing in the nighttime." "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Am dining at Goldini's Restaurant, Gloucester Road, Kensington. Please come at once and join me there. Bring with you a jemmy, a dark lantern, a chisel, and a revolver. S. H." It was a nice equipment for a respectable citizen to carry through the dim, fog-draped streets.

Arthur Conan Doyle
There is a soul-jealousy that can be as frantic as any body-jealousy.

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
It is the unofficial force—the Baker Street irregulars.

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
A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.

Arthur Conan Doyle
"I have seen those symptoms before," said Holmes, throwing his cigarette into the fire. "Oscillation upon the pavement always means an affaire de coeur."

Arthur Conan Doyle
Keep your revolver near you night and day, and never relax your precautions.

Arthur Conan Doyle
There's a light in a woman's eyes that speaks louder than words.

Arthur Conan Doyle
When a fact appears to be opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation.

Arthur Conan Doyle
The most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.

Arthur Conan Doyle
A fine horse or a beautiful woman, I cannot look at them unmoved, even now when seventy winters have chilled my blood.

Arthur Conan Doyle
There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.

Arthur Conan Doyle
[Professor Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city.

Arthur Conan Doyle
To the man who loves art for its own sake,... it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.

Arthur Conan Doyle