Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

One must wait till it comes.

What a lovely thing a rose is!

It is hardly fair to blame America for the state of San Francisco, for its population is cosmopolitan and its seaport attracts the floating vice of the Pacific; but be the cause what it may, there is much room for spiritual betterment.

One forms provisional theories and waits for time or fuller knowledge to explode them. A bad habit, Mr. Ferguson, but human nature is weak. Sherlock Holmes speaking with Dr. Watson.

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. [...] It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. [...] It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

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.

I felt Holmes's hand steal into mine and give me a reassuring shake. - Watson

The grand thing is to be able to reason backwards.

To all the world he was the man of violence, half animal and half demon; but to her he always remained the little wilful boy of her own girlhood, the child who had clung to her hand. Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.

Violence is sometimes a duty.

I cannot live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the duncoloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material?

There is nothing like first-hand evidence.

Watson. Come at once if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same.

There is nothing more to be said or to be done tonight, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellowmen.

All right, Watson. Don’t look so scared,” he muttered in a very weak voice. “It’s not as bad as it seems.” “Thank God for that!” “I’m a bit of a single-stick expert, as you know. I took most of them on my guard. It was the second man that was too much for me.” “What can I do, Holmes? Of course, it was that damned fellow who set them on. I’ll go and thrash the hide off him if you give the word.” “Good old Watson!(...)

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.

Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.

I never can resist a touch of the dramatic.

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!

Let me see. What are my other shortcomings?

Everything I have to say has already crossed your mind." "Then possibly my answer has crossed yours.

Let us hear the suspicions. I will look after the proofs.

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.

There is a danger there - a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?

When you have one of the first brains of Europe up against you, and all the powers of darkness at his back, there are infinite possibilities.

Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools.

Heaven, too, was very near to them in those days. God's direct agency was to be seen in the thunder and the rainbow, the whirlwind and the lightning. To the believer, clouds of angels and confessors, and martyrs, armies of the sainted and the saved, were ever stooping over their struggling brethren upon earth, raising, encouraging, and supporting them.

The soul is swayed by the waters.

There are no crimes and no criminals in these days. What is the use of having brains in our profession? I know well that I have it in me to make my name famous. No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done. And what is the result? There is no crime to detect, or, at most, some bungling villainy with a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it.

I do hate the City of London! It is the only thing which ever comes between us.

If I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one.

The fair sex is your department.

There seems to me to be absolutely no limit to the inanity and credulity of the human race. Homo Sapiens! Homo idioticus!

...while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.

You have been in Afghanistan I perceive.

Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to use all the facts which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclopaedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment.

Of all ruins, that of a noble mind is the most deplorable.

The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.

His love of danger, his intense appreciation of the drama of an adventure--all the more intense for being held tightly in--his consistent view that every peril in life is a form of sport, a fierce game betwixt you and Fate, with Death as a forfeit, made him a wonderful companion at such hours.

I wanted to end the world but,I'll settle for ending yours.

What one man can invent, another can discover.

It is a pity he did not write in pencil. As you have no doubt frequently observed, the impression usually goes through -- a fact which has dissolved many a happy marriage.

Do you know anything on earth which has not a dangerous side if it is mishandled and exaggerated?

What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done?

Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different

It’s every man’s business to see justice done.

There was a brisk northern wind, heavy and wet with the salt of the sea, and he felt, as he turned his face to it, fresh life and strength surging in his blood and bracing his limbs.

There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done.