Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

You know, Watson, I don't mind confessing to you that I have always had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal. --Sherlock Holmes

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the countryside, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year, Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed, The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation--sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Oh how I've missed you, Holmes.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Yes, the setting (Dartmoor) is a worthy one. If the devil did desire to have a hand in the affairs of men.Sherlock Holmes

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Before we begin to investigate that, let us try to realize what we do know, so as to make the most of it, and to separate the essential from the accidental.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

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. It's smell and it's color 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.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn. This murder would have been infinitely more difficult to unravel had the body of the victim been simply found lying in the roadway without any of those outré and sensational accompaniments which have rendered it remarkable. These strange details, far from making the case more difficult, have really had the effect of making it less so.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The future was with Fate. The present was our own.~ The Poison Belt

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I fear that I bore you with these details, but I have to let you see my little difficulties, if you are to understand the situation.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Well,' said our engineer ruefully as we took our seats to return once more to London, 'it has been a pretty business for me! I have lost my thumb and I have lost a fifty-guinea fee, and what have I gained?''Experience,' said Holmes, laughing. 'Indirectly it may be of value, you know; you have only to put it into words to gain the reputation of being excellent company for the remainder of your existence.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence—‘This account of you we have from all quarters received.’ A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Her cuisine is limited but she has as good an idea of breakfast as a Scotchw

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger's Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offenses, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders, and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Jealousy is a strange transformer of characters.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

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

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Who knows, Watson? Woman's heart and mind are insoluble puzzles to the male.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

It is only goodness which gives extra...

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Perhaps when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I assure you, my good Lestrade, that I have an excellent reason for everything that I do.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when [Holmes] became a specialist in crime.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

That hurts my pride, Watson. It is a petty feeling, no doubt, but it hurts my pride. It becomes a personal matter with me now...-Sherlock Holmes--The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Five Orange Pips-

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

He 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. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

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.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I do not know whether it came from his own innate depravity or from the promptings of his master, but he was rude enough to set a dog at me. Neither dog nor man liked the look of my stick, however, and the matter fell through. Relations were strained after that, and further inquiries out of the question.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

No violence, gentlemen — no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture!

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

My job is to know what other people do not know.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I would not bring one shadow on his life, and this I know would break his noble heart.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

To underestimate oneself is as much an exaggeration of one's powers than the other.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Some believe what separates men from animals is our ability to reason. Others say it’s language or romantic love, or opposable thumbs. Living here in this lost world, I’ve come to believe it is more than our biology. What truly makes us human is our unending search, our abiding desire for immortality.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I trust that age doth not wither nor custom stale my infinite variety.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Am dining at Goldini's Restaurant, Gloucester Road, Kensington. Please come at once and join me there. Bring with you a jemmy, a dark lantern, a chisel, and a revolver. S. H. It was a nice equipment for a respectable citizen to carry through the dim, fog-draped streets.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle