Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

365 Sourced Quotes

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
"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
Brothers are a blessing for one thing. There is no possibility of any young lady getting unreasonably conceited if she be endowed with them.

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
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
[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
Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age.

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
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
It is the unofficial force—the Baker Street irregulars.

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

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
"... 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
A trusty comrade is always of use; and a chronicler still more so.

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

Arthur Conan Doyle
There are times, young fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right and justice, or you never feel clean again.

Arthur Conan Doyle
If you want to write good copy, you must be where the things are.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Several incidents in my life have convinced me of spiritual interposition - of the promptings of some beneficent force outside ourselves, which tries to help us where it can.

Arthur Conan Doyle
I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.

Arthur Conan Doyle
It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Arthur Conan Doyle
There seems to me to be absolutely no limit to the inanity and credulity of the human race. Homo Sapiens! Homo idioticus!

Arthur Conan Doyle
I should dearly love that the world should be ever so little better for my presence. Even on this small stage we have our two sides, and something might be done by throwing all one's weight on the scale of breadth, tolerance, charity, temperance, peace, and kindliness to man and beast. We can't all strike very big blows, and even the little ones count for something.

Arthur Conan Doyle
It is quite a three-pipe problem, and I beg that you won't speak to me for fifty minutes.

Arthur Conan Doyle
What the deuce is it to me?" he 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 or to my work.

Arthur Conan Doyle
"What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence", returned my companion, bitterly. "The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done."

Arthur Conan Doyle