Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

365 Sourced Quotes

Some people's affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls.

Arthur Conan Doyle
It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy. It cost one man his reason, it cost me a blood-letting, and it cost yet another man the penalties of the law. Yet there was certainly an element of comedy. Well, you shall judge for yourselves.

Arthur Conan Doyle
His neighbor is a tooth-drawer. That bag at his girdle is full of the teeth that he drew at Winchester fair. I warrant that there are more sound ones than sorry, for he is quick at his work and a trifle dim in the eye.

Arthur Conan Doyle
It's a wicked world, and when a clever man turns his brain to crime it is the worst of all.

Arthur Conan Doyle
One should always look for a possible alternative, and provide against it. It is the first rule of criminal investigation.

Arthur Conan Doyle
I have mastered the principles of several religions. They have all shocked me by the violence which I should have to do to my reason to accept the dogmas of any one of them.

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

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
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
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
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
"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
One forms provisional theories and waits for time or fuller knowledge to explode them. A bad habit, Mr. Ferguson, but human nature is weak. Sherlock Holmes speaking with Dr. Watson.

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
Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.

Arthur Conan Doyle
The sky was of the deepest blue, with a few white, fleecy clouds drifting lazily across it, and the air was filled with the low drone of insects or with a sudden sharper note as bee or bluefly shot past with its quivering, long-drawn hum, like an insect tuning-fork.

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
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
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
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
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