Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

365 Sourced Quotes

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
Still, it is an error to argue in front of your data. You can find yourself insensibly twisting them round to suit your theories.

Arthur Conan Doyle
What horrible work this chemistry is! Look at my frock! It is ruined. And this dreadful smell!

Arthur Conan Doyle
These hieroglyphics have evidently a meaning. If it is a purely arbitrary one, it may be impossible for us to solve it. If, on the other hand, it is systematic, I have no doubt that we shall get to the bottom of it.

Arthur Conan Doyle
A further knowledge of facts is necessary before I would venture to give a final and definite opinion.

Arthur Conan Doyle
We tottered together upon the brink of the fall. I have some knowledge, however, of baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me. I slipped through his grip, and he with a horrible scream kicked madly for a few seconds and clawed the air with both his hands.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Just see how it glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime. Every good stone is. They are the devil

Arthur Conan Doyle
Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is its own reward.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Ah! my dear Watson, there we come into those realms of conjecture where the most logical mind may be at fault.

Arthur Conan Doyle
To that Providence, my sons, I hereby commend you, and I counsel you by way of caution to forbear from crossing the moor in those dark hours when the powers of evil are exalted.

Arthur Conan Doyle
It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons.

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
There is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps.

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
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
No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done.

Arthur Conan Doyle
He foresaw that she would be very much more useful to him in the character of a free woman.

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
Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud stains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.

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
"My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere."

Arthur Conan Doyle
I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.

Arthur Conan Doyle
And once again Mr. Sherlock Holmes is free to devote his life to examining those interesting little problems which the complexity of human life so pletifuly presents.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Man, it's Witchcraft! Where in the name of all that is wonderful did you get those names?

Arthur Conan Doyle
The more outre' and grotesque an incident is the more carefully it deserves to be examined, and the very point which appears to complicate a case is, when duly considered and scientifically handled, the one which is most likely to elucidate it.

Arthur Conan Doyle