Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

365 Sourced Quotes

Are you conscious of the restful influence which the stars exert? To me they are the most soothing things in Nature. I am proud to say that I don't know the name of one of them. The glamour and romance would pass away from them if they were all classified and ticketed in one's brain. But when a man is hot and flurried, and full of his own little ruffled dignities and infinitesimal misfortunes, then a star bath is the finest thing in the world.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Do you know anything on earth which has not a dangerous side if it is mishandled and exaggerated?

Arthur Conan Doyle
"I find it hard enough to tackle facts, Holmes, without flying away after theories and fancies." "You are right," said Holmes demurely; "you do find it very hard to tackle the facts."

Arthur Conan Doyle
Is he not the celebrated author of the Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it?

Arthur Conan Doyle
If the fresh facts which come to our knowledge all fit themselves into the scheme, then our hypothesis may gradually become a solution.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Science seeks knowledge. Let the knowledge lead us where it will, we still must seek it. To know once for all what we are, why we are, where we are, is that not in itself the greatest of all human aspirations?

Arthur Conan Doyle
"No data yet," he answered. "It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all of the evidence. It biases the judgment.

Arthur Conan Doyle
"But the Solar System!" I protested. "What the deuce is it to me?" [Sherlock Holmes] 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."

Arthur Conan Doyle
It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery.

Arthur Conan Doyle
"Not a bird my dear Roxton — not a bird?" "A beast?" "No; a reptile — a dinosaur. Nothing else could have left such a track."

Arthur Conan Doyle
The setting is a worthy one, if the devil did desire to have a hand in the affairs of men.

Arthur Conan Doyle
We are coming now rather into the region of guesswork, said Dr. Mortimer. Say, rather, into the region where we balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination, but we have always some material basis on which to start our speculation.

Arthur Conan Doyle
If you will find the facts, perhaps others may find the explanation.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before.

Arthur Conan Doyle
The human brain is capable of only one strong emotion at a time, and if it be filled with curiosity or scientific enthusiasm, there is no room for fear.

Arthur Conan Doyle
The great bell of Beaulieu was ringing. Far away through the forest might be heard its musical clangor and swell.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Every problem becomes very childish when once it is explained to you.

Arthur Conan Doyle
A physical theory is not an explanation. It is a system of mathematical propositions, deduced from a small number of principles, which aim... to represent as simply, as completely, and as exactly as possible a group of experimental laws.

Arthur Conan Doyle
It isn't true that the laws of nature have been capriciously disturbed; that snakes have talked; that women have been turned into salt; that rods have brought water out of rocks.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Let me run over the principal steps. We approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories. We were simply there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations.

Arthur Conan Doyle
The sole purpose of physical theory is to provide a representation and classification of experimental laws; the only test permitting us to judge a physical theory and pronounce it good or bad is the comparison between the consequences of this theory and the experimental laws it has to represent and classify.

Arthur Conan Doyle
If a gentleman walks into my room smelling of iodoform, with a black mark of nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge on the right side of his top-hat to show where he has secreted his stethoscope, I must be dull, indeed, if I do not pronounce him to be an active member of the medical profession.

Arthur Conan Doyle
It is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though perhaps a meretricious, effect.

Arthur Conan Doyle
I have devised seven separate explanations, each of which would cover the facts as far as we know them. But which of these is correct can only be determined by the fresh information which we shall no doubt find waiting for us.

Arthur Conan Doyle
On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Critics kind never mind! Critics flatter no matter! Critics blame all the same! Do your best damn the rest!

Arthur Conan Doyle
Pon my word Watson, you are coming along wonderfully. We have really done very well indeed. It is true that you have missed everything of importance, but you have hit upon the method...

Arthur Conan Doyle
It is... an alteration of perspective, a shifting of our sense of proportion, a vivid realization that we are insignificant and evanescent creatures, existing on sufferance and at the mercy of the first chill wind from the unknown.

Arthur Conan Doyle
The ideal scientific mind should be capable of thinking out a point of abstract knowledge in the interval between its owner falling from a balloon and reaching the earth. Men of this strong fiber are needed to form the conquerors of nature and the bodyguard of truth.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Not invisible, but unnoticed, Watson. You did not know where to look, and so you missed all that was important.

Arthur Conan Doyle