Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

365 Sourced Quotes

Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.

Arthur Conan Doyle
I think that you know me well enough, Watson, to understand that I am by no means a nervous man. At the same time, it is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.

Arthur Conan Doyle
My mind 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. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Only that I insist upon your dining with us. It will be ready in half an hour. I have oysters and a brace of grouse, with something a little choice in white wines. Watson, you have never yet recognized my merits as a housekeeper.
Sherlock Holmes speaking

Arthur Conan Doyle
Might I trouble you to open the window, for chloroform vapour does not help the palate.

Arthur Conan Doyle
It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau's example.

Arthur Conan Doyle
I could not rest, Watson, I could not sit quiet in my chair, if I thought that such a man as Professor Moriarty were walking the streets of London unchallenged.

Arthur Conan Doyle
We surely know by some nameless instinct more about our futures than we think we know.

Arthur Conan Doyle
I am afraid that I rather give myself away when I explain. Results without causes are much more impressive.

Arthur Conan Doyle
You mentioned your name as if I should recognize it, but beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you.

Arthur Conan Doyle
It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.

Arthur Conan Doyle
The unexpected has happened so continually in my life that it has ceased to deserve the name.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Perhaps, when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand.

Arthur Conan Doyle
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
The husband was a teetotaller, there was no other woman, and the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife.

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