Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes
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Conceive a jelly-fish such as sails in our summer seas, bell-shaped and of enormous size - far larger, I should judge, than the dome of St. Paul's. It was of a light pink colour veined with a delicate green, but the whole huge fabric so tenuous that it was but a fairy outline against the dark blue sky. It pulsated with a delicate and regular rhythm. From it there depended two long drooping, green tentacles, which swayed slowly backwards and forwards. This gorgeous vision passed gently with noiseless dignity over my head, as light and fragile as a soap-bubble, and drifted upon its stately way.
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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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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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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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A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the theory of reincarnation.
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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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Let us hear the suspicions. I will look after the proofs.
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Three quiet days. This hell fiend is like a cat with a mouse. She lets me loose only to pounce upon me again. I am never so frightened as when every thing is still.
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It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which set an edge to a man's energy.
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Life, it turns out, is infinitely more clever and adaptable than anyone had ever supposed.
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Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it.
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It is always a joy to meet an American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of those who believes that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.
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I fear that if the matter is beyond humanity, it is certainly beyond me.
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As I turned away, I saw Holmes, with his back against a rock and his arms folded, gazing down at the rush of the waters. It was the last that I was ever destined to see of him in this world.
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Even the best of us are thrown off some- times.
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Of all ruins, that of a noble mind is the most deplorable.
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I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.
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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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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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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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The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.
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I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.
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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 is no satisfaction in vengeance unless the offender has time to realize who it is that strikes him, and why retribution has come upon him.