Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

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

“But love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things.”

“A study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon? There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”

“I never can resist a touch of the dramatic.”

“One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature”

“So tomorrow we disappear into the unknown. This account I am transmitting down the river by canoe, and it may be our last word to those who are interested in our fate.”

“Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”

“His Ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.”

“We can but try.”

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

“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”

“Have you tried to drive a harpoon through a body? No? Tut, tut, my dear sir, you must really pay attention to these details.”

“It is more than possible; it is probable.”

“There is a soul-jealousy that can be as frantic as any body-jealousy.”

“I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge.”

“Let me see. What are my other shortcomings?”

“Every man finds his limitations, Mr. Holmes, but at least it cures us of the weakness of self-satisfaction.”

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

“Well, well, my dear fellow, be it so. We have shared this same room for some years, and it would be amusing if we ended by sharing the same cell. (…)”

“We must look for consistency. Where there is a want of it we must suspect deception.”

“There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.”

“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.”

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

“Accounts are not quite settled between us," said she, with a passion that equaled my own. "I can love, and I can hate. You had your choice. You chose to spurn the first; now you must test the other.”

“This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.”

“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.”

“One must wait till it comes.”

“I suppose I shall have to compound a felony, as usual.”

“It seems to leave the darkness rather blacker than before.”

“He is not a bad fellow, though an absolute imbecile in his profession. He has one positive virtue. He is as brave as a bulldog and as tenacious as a lobster if he gets his claws upon anyone.”

“There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror.”

“Jealousy is a strange transformer of characters.”

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

“There is no satisfaction in vengeance unless the offender has time to realize who it is that strikes him, and why retribution has come upon him.”

“It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?”

“It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

“It is easy to be wise after the event.”

“My business is that of every other good citizen - to uphold the law.”

“If in 100 years I am only known as the man who invented Sherlock Holmes then I will have considered my life a failure.”

“I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.”

“What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts.”

“Because it is my desire. Is that not enough?"

[Sherlock Holmes on his. ]”

“Quite simple, my dear Watson”

“I should dearly love that the world should be ever so little better for my presence. Even on this small stage we have our two sides, and something might be done by throwing all one's weight on the scale of breadth, tolerance, charity, temperance, peace, and kindliness to man and beast. We can't all strike very big blows, and even the little ones count for something.”

“At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society.”

“The whole doctrine of original sin, the Fall, the vicarious Atonement, the placation of the Almighty by blood—all this is abhorrent to me. The spirit-guides do not insist upon these aspects of religion.”

“I can tell you that it is no game for children, and I will confess that, in spite of my nine campaigns, I felt myself turn pale when the first ball flashed past me.”

“The highest morality may prove also to be the highest wisdom when the half-told story comes to be finished.”

“We are used to see that Man despises what he never comprehends.”