Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes
-
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.
-
In shape they were like horrible toads, and moved in a succession of springs, but in size they were of an incredible bulk, larger than the largest elephant. We had never before seen them save at night, and indeed they are nocturnal animals save when disturbed in their lairs, as these had been. We now stood amazed at the sight, for their blotched and warty skins were of a curious fish-like iridescence, and the sunlight struck them with an ever-varying rainbow bloom as they moved.
-
I have wrought my simple plan If I give one hour of joy To the boy who’s half a man, Or the man who’s half a boy.
-
I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.
-
I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of daily life.
-
if i could be assured of your destruction, i would in the interest of the public, cheerfully accept my death.
-
You will ruin no more lives as you ruined mine. You will wring no more hearts as you wrung mine. I will free the world of a poisonous thing. Take that, you hound, and that! - and that! - and that! - and that!
-
The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.
-
Well, I'm a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye.
-
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.
-
There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.
-
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.
-
I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air -- or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
-
It is quite a three pipe problem, and I beg that you won't speak to me for fifty minutes.
-
Life, it turns out, is infinitely more clever and adaptable than anyone had ever supposed.
-
A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.
-
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.
-
Anything seems commonplace, once explained.
-
My sister and I, you will recollect, were twins, and you know how subtle are the links which bind two souls which are so closely allied.
-
You yourself may not be luminous, but you are a conductor of light.
-
The chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.
-
Critics kind never mind! Critics flatter no matter! Critics blame all the same! Do your best damn the rest!
-
So tomorrow we disappear into the unknown. This account I am transmitting down the river by canoe, and it may be our last word to those who are interested in our fate.
-
His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing... My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System.