“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, book The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Source: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes …" by Arthur Conan Doyle?

Arthur Conan Doyle photo

Arthur Conan Doyle166

Scottish physician and author 1859–1930

Related quotes

“As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is, the less mysterious it proves to be.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

Source: The Complete Sherlock Holmes

“To the European poet the relation between man and woman is a thing of supreme importance and mystery. To the Chinese, it is something commonplace, obvious—a need of the body, not a satisfaction of the emotions.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1919), Introduction, p. 18

“Be commonplace and creeping, and you attain all things.”

Pierre Beaumarchais book The Barber of Seville

Médiocre et rampant, et l'on arrive à tout.
Act III, scene vii. Reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 759-62.
Le Barbier de Séville (1773)

“Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.”

Willa Cather book Shadows on the Rock

Shadows on the Rock (1931), Epilogue

“People have curious attitudes about nudity just as they have about sex. Nudity and sex are the most commonplace things in the world. Yet people often act as if they were things that only existed on Mars.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

Source: As quoted in My Story (2006) by Marilyn Monroe and Ben Hecht p. 60

“A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

“It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.”

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet

“Still, no matter how commonplace, one’s death is the most interesting event of one’s life.”

Robert Sheckley book Immortality, Inc.

Source: Immortality, Inc. (1959), Chapter 1 (p. 1)

“The Old Man’s unique gift was the ability to reason logically with unfamiliar, hard-to-believe facts as easily with the commonplace. Not much, eh? Most minds stall dead when faced with facts which conflict with basic beliefs; “I-just-can’t-believe-it” is all one word to highbrows and dimwits alike.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Puppet Masters

Source: The Puppet Masters (1951), Chapter 3 (p. 20)

“A dim consciousness of infinite mystery and grandeur lies beneath all the commonplace of life. There is an awfulness and a majesty around us, in all our little worldliness.”

Albert Pike book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XXII : Grand Master Architect, p. 190

Related topics