Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

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

When once your point of view is changed, the very thing which was so damning becomes a clue to the truth.

It was all love on my side, and all good comradeship and friendship on hers. When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man.

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.

It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.

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.

There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done.

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

You cannot see the lettuce and the dressing without suspecting a salad.

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

Jealousy is a strange transformer of characters.

You yourself may not be luminous, but you are a conductor of light.

You never tire of the moor. You cannot think the wonderful secrets which it contains. It is so vast, and so barren, and so mysterious.

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.

Life, it turns out, is infinitely more clever and adaptable than anyone had ever supposed.

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

A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.

There is nothing more to be said or to be done tonight, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellowmen.

Draw your chair up, and hand me my violin, for the only problem which we have still to solve is how to while away these bleak autumnal evenings.

Violence recoils on the violent.

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

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.

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

We all learn by experience, and your lesson this time is that you should never lose sight of the alternative. Sherlock Holmes speaking with Dr. Watson.

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.

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

I am not the law, but I represent justice so far as my feeble powers go.

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

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

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

We have much to hope from the flowers.

My mind rebels at stagnation, give me problems, give me work!

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

"I have seen those symptoms before," said Holmes, throwing his cigarette into the fire. "Oscillation upon the pavement always means an affaire de coeur."

He burst into one of his rare fits of laughter as he turned away from the picture. I have not heard him laugh often, and it has always boded ill to somebody.

No: I am not tired. I have a curious constitution. I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely." ~ Sherlock Holmes

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

I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.

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

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

One must wait till it comes.

What one man can invent, another can discover.

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

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

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

The devil’s agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?

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

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

We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination.

It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognise out of a number of facts which are incidental and which are vital.