Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes
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It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn. This murder would have been infinitely more difficult to unravel had the body of the victim been simply found lying in the roadway without any of those outré and sensational accompaniments which have rendered it remarkable. These strange details, far from making the case more difficult, have really had the effect of making it less so.
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Healthy scepticism is the basis of all accurate observation.
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I think you want a little unofficial help. Three undetected murders in one year won't do, Lestrade. But you handled the Molesey Mystery with less than your usual - that's to say, you handled it fairly well.
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if i could be assured of your destruction, i would in the interest of the public, cheerfully accept my death.
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Life, my dear Watson, is infinitely stranger than fiction; stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We could not conceive the things that are merely commonplace to existence. If we could hover over this great city, remove the roofs, and peep in at the things going on, it would make all fiction, with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions flat, stale and unprofitable.
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Anything seems commonplace, once explained.
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So it was, my dear Watson, that at two o'clock today I found myself in my old armchair in my own old room, and only wishing that I could have seen my old friend Watson in the other chair which he has so often adorned.
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I think that I had better go, Holmes." "Not a bit, doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell.
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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.
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It is decreed by a merciful Nature that the human brain cannot think of two things simultaneously . . .
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The good Watson had at that time deserted me for a wife, the only selfish action I can recall in our association. I was alone.
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I had ... come to an entirely erroneous conclusion, which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data.
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Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.
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It's quite exciting," said Sherlock Holmes, with a yawn.
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You yourself may not be luminous, but you are a conductor of light.
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Ah! my dear Watson, there we come into those realms of conjecture, where the most logical mind may be at fault.
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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.
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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.
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It is more than possible; it is probable.
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Everything comes in circles... The old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes up. It's all been done before, and will be again.
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Clouds of insects danced and buzzed in the golden autumn light, and the air was full of the piping of the song-birds. Long, glinting dragonflies shot across the path, or hung tremulous with gauzy wings and gleaming bodies.
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There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.
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Should I ever marry, Watson, I should hope to inspire my wife with some feeling which would prevent her from being walked off by a housekeeper when my corpse was lying within a few yards of her.
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When you have one of the first brains of Europe up against you, and all the powers of darkness at his back, there are infinite possibilities.