Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes
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What one man can invent, another can discover.
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It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.
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Once or twice in my career I feel that I have done more real harm by my discovery of the criminal than ever he had done by his crime. I have learned caution now, and I had rather play tricks with the law of England than with my own conscience.
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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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Like all Holmes' reasoning, the thing seemed simplicity itself when it was once explained. Dr. Watson, speaking of Sherlock Holmes.
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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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We surely know by some nameless instinct more about our futures than we think we know.
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We all learn by experience, and your lesson this time is that you should never lose sight of the alternative.
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It is more than possible; it is probable.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.
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Life, it turns out, is infinitely more clever and adaptable than anyone had ever supposed.
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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.
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I have mastered the principles of several religions. They have all shocked me by the violence which I should have to do to my reason to accept the dogmas of any one of them.
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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.
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What is the meaning of it, Watson? said Holmes solemnly as he laid down the paper. "What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.
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You know how easily and suddenly these things happen, beginning in playful teasing and ending in something a little warmer than friendship. You squeeze the slender arm which is passed through yours, you venture to take the little gloved hand, you say good night at absurd length in the shadow of the door. It is innocent and very interesting, love trying his wings in a first little flutter.
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Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau's example.
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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.
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I have my own views about Nature's methods, though I feel that it is rather like a beetle giving his...
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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.