Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.

When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.

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.

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

When the impossible has been eliminated, all that remains no matter how improbable is possible.

While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.

How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!

Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner.

Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.

It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.

I'm not a psychopath, I'm a fully functioning sociopath. Do your research.

As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.

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.

My dear Watson," said [Sherlock Holmes], "I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one's self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one's own powers.

There are always some lunatics about. It would be a dull world without them.

His sanguine spirit turns every firefly into a star.

I carry my own church about under my own hat," said I. "Bricks and mortar won't make a staircase to heaven. I believe with your Master that the human heart is the best temple.

The most dangerous condition for a man or a nation is when his intellectual side is more developed than his spiritual. Is that not exactly the condition of the world today?

Strange indeed is human nature. Here were these men, to whom murder was familiar, who again and again had struck down the father of the family, some man against whom they had no personal feeling, without one thought of compunction or of compassion for his weeping wife or helpless children, and yet the tender or pathetic in music could move them to tears.

He [Professor Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.

How sweet the morning air is! ...How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

You are my heart, my life, my one and only thought.

There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.

I could not rest, Watson, I could not sit quiet in my chair, if I thought that such a man as Professor Moriarty were walking the streets of London unchallenged.

When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.

Holy Men! Holy Cabbages! Holy Bean Pods! What do they do but live and suck in sustenance and grow fat?

So it was, my dear Watson, that at two o'clock today I found myself in my old armchair in my own old room, and only wishing that I could have seen my old friend Watson in the other chair which he has so often adorned. - Sherlock Holmes.

I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air -- or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.

Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it.

The love of books is among the choicest gifts of the gods.

Picnics are very dear to those who are in the first stage of the tender passion.

You see, but you do not observe.

I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.

Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.

The chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.

We can't command our love, but we can our actions.

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

I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.

Clouds of insects danced and buzzed in the golden autumn light, and the air was full of the piping of the song-birds. Long, glinting dragonflies shot across the path, or hung tremulous with gauzy wings and gleaming bodies.

When we think how narrow and devious this path of nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great and terrible possibilities loom ever shadowly upwards, it is a bold and a confident man who will put a limit to the strange by-oaths into which the human spirit may wander.

Some people's affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls.

It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.