Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes
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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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Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.
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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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All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience.
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You wish to put me in the dark. I tell you that I will never be put in the dark. You wish to beat me. I tell you that you will never beat me.
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No: I am not tired. I have a curious constitution. I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.
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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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I'm not a psychopath, I'm a fully functioning sociopath. Do your research.
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Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.
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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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It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.
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I must apologize for calling so late," said he, "and I must further beg you to be so unconventional as to allow me to leave your house presently by scrambling over your back garden wall.
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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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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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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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Well, sir, let us do what we can to curtail this visit, which can hardly be agreeable to you, and is inexpressibly irksome to me.
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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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It was all love on my side, and all good comradeship and friendship on hers. When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man.
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A man always finds it hard to realize that he may have finally lost a woman's love, however badly he may have treated her.
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It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognise out of a number of facts which are incidental and which are vital.
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Of all ruins, that of a noble mind is the most deplorable.
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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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Living, as I do, in an educated and scientific atmosphere, I could not have conceived that the first principles of zoology were so little known. Is it possible that you do not know the elementary fact in comparative anatomy, that the wing of a bird is really the forearm, while the wing of a bat consists of three elongated fingers with membranes between?
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It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.