Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l'admire.A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

She was as good as she was beautiful and as intelligent as she was good.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

‎A change of work is the best rest.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Anything is better than stagnation.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.' That's a rather broad idea,' I remarked. One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,' he answered.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

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!

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces. The sea air, sunshine, and patience, Watson—all else will come.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Miss Morstan and I stood together, and her hand was in mine. A wondrous subtle thing is love, for here were we two, who had never seen each other until that day, between whom no word or even look of affection had ever passed, and yet now in an hour of trouble our hands instinctively sought for each other. I have marveled at it since, but at the time it seemed the most natural thing that I would go out to her so, and, as she has often told me, there was in her also the instinct to turn to me for comfort and protection. So we stood hand in hand like two children, and there was peace in our hearts for all the dark things that surrounded us.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

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.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

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.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

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

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The bent head, the averted eye, the faltering voice, the wincing figure- these, and not the unshrinking gaze and frank reply, are the true signals of passion.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Over the green squares of the fields and the low curves of a wood there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance like some fantastic landscape in a dream. Baskerville sat for a long time, his gaze fixed upon it, and I read upon his eager face how much it meant to him, this first sight of that strange spot where the men of his blood had held sway so long and left their mark so deep.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

My correspondence has certainly the charm of variety, and the humbler are usually the more interesting. This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

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

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own. You may not appreciate them at first. You may pine for your novel of crude and unadulterated adventure. You may, and will, give it the preference when you can. But the dull days come, and the rainy days come, and always you are driven to fill up the chinks of your reading with the worthy books which wait so patiently for your notice. And then suddenly, on a day which marks an epoch in your life, you understand the difference. You see, like a flash, how the one stands for nothing, and the other for literature. From that day onwards you may return to your crudities, but at least you do so with some standard of comparison in your mind. You can never be the same as you were before. Then gradually the good thing becomes more dear to you; it builds itself up with your growing mind; it becomes a part of your better self, and so, at last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers and love them for all that they have meant in the past.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Why should you go further in it? What have you to gain from it?''What, indeed? It is art for art's sake, Watson. I suppose when you doctored, you found yourself studying cases without thought of a fee?''For my education, Holmes.''Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

It was amusing to me to see how the detective's overbearing manner had changed suddenly to that of a child asking questions of its teacher.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The country inspector's face had shown his intense amazement at the rapid and masterful progress of Holmes' investigation. At first he had shown some disposition to assert his own position, but now he was overcome with admiration, and ready to follow without question wherever Holmes lead.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Desultory readers are seldom remarkable for the exactness of their learning.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

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.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

One likes to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange, impossible place where the beaux of Fielding may still make love to the belles of Richardson, where Scott’s heroes still may strut, Dickens’s delightful Cockneys still raise a laugh, and Thackeray’s worldlings continue to carry on their reprehensible careers. Perhaps in some humble corner of such a Valhalla, Sherlock and his Watson may for a time find a place, while some more astute sleuth with some even less astute comrade may fill the stage which they have vacated.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I don't take much stock of detectives in novels - chaps that do things and never let you see how they do them. That's just inspiration: not business.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

[O]n general principles it is best that I should not leave the country. Scotland Yard feels lonely without me, and it causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

She was weak and helpless, shaken in mind and nerve. It was to take her at a disadvantage to obtrude love upon her at such a time.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

When a man does a queer thing, or two queer things, there may be a meaning to it, but when everything he does is queer, then you begin to wonder

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

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

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

In my inmost heart I believed that I could succeed where others failed, and now I had the opportunity to test myself.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

From my boyhood I have had an intense and overwhelming conviction that my real vocation lay in the direction of literature. I have, however, had a most unaccountable difficulty in getting any responsible person to share my

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

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

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

As a rule, 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.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

No: I am not tired. I have a curious constitution. I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely. ~ Sherlock Holmes

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Only that I insist upon your dining with us. It will be ready in half an hour. I have oysters and a brace of grouse, with something a little choice in white wines. Watson, you have never yet recognized my merits as a housekeeper. ~ Sherlock Holmes

~ Arthur Conan Doyle