Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes
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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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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.
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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.
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What one man can invent, another can discover.
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Life, it turns out, is infinitely more clever and adaptable than anyone had ever supposed.
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Anything seems commonplace, once explained.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.
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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.
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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.
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A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.
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The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.
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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.
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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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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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Critics kind never mind! Critics flatter no matter! Critics blame all the same! Do your best damn the rest!
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The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.
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It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?
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You yourself may not be luminous, but you are a conductor of light.
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You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?" "For me," said Sherlock Holmes, "there still remains the cocaine bottle.
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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.
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When once your point of view is changed, the very thing which was so damning becomes a clue to the truth.