Arthur Conan Doyle Quotations

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

We can't command our love, but we can our actions.

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.

I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.

As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.

Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

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

I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.

Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.

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.

Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.

I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.

The ideal reasoner, he remarked, would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.

The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless.

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.

When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.

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

A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem.

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

Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.

For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.

Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.

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.

Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.

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.

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

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.

As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.

The love of books is among the choicest gifts of the gods.

It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?

A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.

Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.

There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.

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.

When the impossible has been eliminated, all that remains no matter how improbable is possible.

You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.

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.

There are always some lunatics about. It would be a dull world without them.

It is not that I think or believe, but that I know.

Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it.

It’s every man’s business to see justice done.

I am somewhat exhausted; I wonder how a battery feels when it pours electricity into a non-conductor?

My dear Watson," said [Sherlock Holmes], "I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one's self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one's own powers.

I get in the dumps at times, and don't open my mouth for days on end. You must not think I am sulky when I do that. Just let me alone, and I'll soon be right.

There's a light in a woman's eyes that speaks louder than words.

I wanted to end the world but,I'll settle for ending yours.

When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.

Jealousy is a strange transformer of characters.

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.

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

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.

Watson. Come at once if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same.

What a creature he was! Never have I felt such a horse between my knees. His great haunches gathered under him with every stride, and he shot forward ever faster and faster, stretched like a greyhound, while the windbeat in my face and whistled past my ears.

There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done.

So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.

There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.

My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people do not know.

Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to use all the facts which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclopaedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment.

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.

At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society.

Picnics are very dear to those who are in the first stage of the tender passion.

Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.

It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.

While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.

I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.

The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.

Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.

How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!

Just as an octopus may have his den in some ocean cave, and come floating out a silent image of horror to attack a swimmer, so I picture such a spirit lurking in the dark of the house which he curses by his presence, and ready to float out upon all whom he can injure.

Come, Watson, come!" he cried. The game is afoot.

The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive.

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.

What a lovely thing a rose is!

It's quite exciting," said Sherlock Holmes, with a yawn.

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

Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.

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.

...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.

You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.

Work is the best antidote to sorrow, my dear Watson.

Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving. As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor.

The mighty voice of Canada will ever call to me.

It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.

The best way of successfully acting a part is to be it.

To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.

'There's no need for fiction in medicine,' remarks Foster... 'for the facts will always beat anything you fancy.'

horses: dangerous on both ends and crafty in the middle

To a great mind, nothing is little,' remarked Holmes, sententiously.

If in 100 years I am only known as the man who invented Sherlock Holmes then I will have considered my life a failure.

There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you.