Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes (166 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Before showing test footage from the movie The Lost World, based upon his novel, as a trick at the annual meeting of the Society of American Magicians in 1922. The New York Times ran a story the next day: DINOSAURS CAVORT IN FILM FOR DOYLE SPIRITIST MYSTIFIES WORLD-FAMED MAGICIANS WITH PICTURES OF PREHISTORIC BEASTS — KEEPS ORIGIN A SECRET — MONSTERS OF OTHER AGES SHOWN, SOME FIGHTING, SOME AT PLAY, IN THEIR NATIVE JUNGLES
Context: These pictures are not occult, but they are psychic because everything that emanates from the human spirit or human brain is psychic. It is not supernatural; nothing is. It is preternatural in the sense that it is not known to our ordinary senses. It is the effect of the joining on the one hand of imagination, and on the other hand of some power of materialization. The imagination, I may say, comes from me — the materializing power from elsewhere.

“Ten years now go further than a thousand then, not so much on account of our finer intellects as because the light we have shows us the way to more.”

Arthur Conan Doyle book The Stark Munro Letters

The Stark Munro Letters (1894)
Context: The more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawning of time. Some eighty thousand years are supposed to have existed between paleolithic and neolithic man. Yet in all that time he only learned to grind his flint stones instead of chipping them. But within our father's lives what changes have there not been? The railway and the telegraph, chloroform and applied electricity. Ten years now go further than a thousand then, not so much on account of our finer intellects as because the light we have shows us the way to more. Primeval man stumbled along with peering eyes, and slow, uncertain footsteps. Now we walk briskly towards our unknown goal.

“I will make my meaning more clear when I say that I think right and wrong are both tools which are being wielded by those great hands which are shaping the destinies of the universe, that both are making for improvement; but that the action of the one is immediate, and that of the other more slow, but none the less certain. Our own distinction of right and wrong is founded too much upon the immediate convenience of the community, and does not inquire sufficiently deeply into the ultimate effect.”

Arthur Conan Doyle book The Stark Munro Letters

The Stark Munro Letters (1894)
Context: When you look closely it is a question whether that which is a wrong to the present community may not prove to have been a right to the interests of posterity. That sounds a little foggy; but I will make my meaning more clear when I say that I think right and wrong are both tools which are being wielded by those great hands which are shaping the destinies of the universe, that both are making for improvement; but that the action of the one is immediate, and that of the other more slow, but none the less certain. Our own distinction of right and wrong is founded too much upon the immediate convenience of the community, and does not inquire sufficiently deeply into the ultimate effect.

“Now we walk briskly towards our unknown goal.”

Arthur Conan Doyle book The Stark Munro Letters

“The more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawning of time.”

Arthur Conan Doyle book The Stark Munro Letters

“I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.”

Arthur Conan Doyle book The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone

Source: The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone

“Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.”

Arthur Conan Doyle book The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Source: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

“To a great mind, nothing is little,' remarked Holmes, sententiously.”

Arthur Conan Doyle book A Study in Scarlet