Top 500 Agatha Christie Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “It was very like a dream. Like all dreamers, however, I could not let my dream alone. We poor humans are so anxious not to miss anything.”

— Agatha Christie

402. “Such a landscape was best enjoyed from a car on a fine afternoon. You exclaimed, “Quel beau paysage!” and drove back to a good hotel.”

— Agatha Christie

403. “People with a grudge against the world are always dangerous. They seem to think life owes them something.”

— Agatha Christie

404. “I always take abroad with me one really good soft pillow – to me it makes all the difference between comfort and misery.”

— Agatha Christie

405. “A murderer is seldom content with one crime. Give him time, and a lack of suspicion, and he’ll commit another.”

— Agatha Christie

406. “It was on the fourth day that the stewardess finally urged me up on deck. Under the impression that I should die quicker below, I had steadfastly refused to leave my bunk. She now tempted me with the advent of Madeira. Hope rose in my breast. I could leave the boat and go ashore and be a parlourmaid there. Anything for dry land.”

— Agatha Christie

407. “The other two waited respectfully while M. Bouc struggled in mental agony.”

— Agatha Christie

408. “A lot of additional pain and grief is caused by honesty,” remarked Hercule Poirot.”

— Agatha Christie

409. “There are doubtless certain unworldly people who are indifferent to money. I myself have never met one.”

— Agatha Christie

410. “Having adventures,” I replied. “Episode III of ‘The Perils of Pamela.’ ” I told her the whole story. She gave vent to a deep sigh when I finished. “Why do these things always happen to you?” she demanded plaintively. “Why does no one gag me and bind me hand and foot?” “You wouldn’t like it if they did,” I assured her. “To tell you the truth, I’m not nearly so keen on having adventures myself as I was. A little of that sort of thing goes a long way.”

— Agatha Christie

411. “Hercule Poirot stared hard at Superintendent Sugden’s moustache. Its luxuriance seemed to fascinate him.”

— Agatha Christie

412. “The chains of habit. We work to attain an object, and the object gained, we find that what we miss is the daily toil.”

— Agatha Christie

413. “Mrs. Cavendish: I am charming to my friends one day, and forget all about them the next.”

— Agatha Christie

414. “We think with horror now of the days when we burnt witches. I believe the day will come when we will shudder to think that we ever hanged criminals.”

— Agatha Christie

415. “But afterwards you went on remembering.”

— Agatha Christie

416. “They wish not to become adult – not to have to accept our kind of responsibility. And yet like all children, they want to be thought grown up, and free to do what they think are grown up things. And that leads sometimes to tragedy and sometimes to the aftermath of tragedy.”

— Agatha Christie

417. “It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.”

— Agatha Christie

Featured in: Strong Quotes

418. “All the same, lots of women buy their clothes in Paris, and have not, on that account, necessarily poisoned their husbands.”

— Agatha Christie

419. “There is no greater mistake in life than seeing things or hearing them at the wrong time. Shakespeare is ruined for most people by having been made to learn it at school; you should see Shakespeare as it was written to be seen, played on the stage. There you can appreciate it quite young, long before you take in the beauty of the words and of the poetry.”

— Agatha Christie

420. “It’s very inconvenient to be loved. Nearly everyone has found that out, sooner or later. The fewer people who love you the less you will have to suffer.”

— Agatha Christie

421. “I’ll break every bone in your damned body, you dirty little whippersnapper,” he said.”

— Agatha Christie

422. “Achievement brings with it its own anticlimax.”

— Agatha Christie

423. “Evil is not any superhuman, but it is HUMAN.”

— Agatha Christie

424. “He went out of the compartment and returned a few moments later with a small spirit stove and a pair of curling tongs. “I use them for the moustaches,” he said, referring to the latter.”

— Agatha Christie

425. “Don’t think. That is the wrong way to bring anything back. Let it go. Sooner or later it will flash into your mind.”

— Agatha Christie

426. “He’s very nice,” said Mrs. Clayton, “but not quite quite, you know. Hasn’t got any idea of culture.” Richard found his room exceedingly comfortable, and his appreciation of Mrs. Clayton as a hostess rose still higher.”

— Agatha Christie

427. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’ve got a plan. But I’ve got an idea. It’s a very useful thing sometimes, an idea. – Superintendent Battle.”

— Agatha Christie

428. “It is the brain, the little grey cells” – he topped his forehead – “on which one must rely. The senses mislead.”

— Agatha Christie

429. “England was in a funny state, a different state from what it had been. Or was it really always in the same state? Always underneath the smooth surface there was some black mud. There wasn’t clear water down to the pebbles, down to the shells, lying on the bottom of the sea. There was something moving, something sluggish somewhere, something that had to be found, suppressed.”

— Agatha Christie

430. “Mr. Jesmond made a peculiar noise rather like a hen who has decided to lay an egg and then thought better of it.”

— Agatha Christie

431. “Whether he acted rightly or not, I have never been sure. It was the future of a child that was at stake. A child, he felt, ought to be given the benefit of a doubt.”

— Agatha Christie

432. “If only father would be decent and die, I should be all right.”

— Agatha Christie

433. “Eve. The Lee family reunion, never a lively affair, is interrupted.”

— Agatha Christie

434. “Exactly! It is absurd – improbable – it cannot be. So I myself have said. And yet, my friend, there it is! One cannot escape from the facts.”

— Agatha Christie

435. “One place is very like another.”

— Agatha Christie

436. “When you find that people are not telling you the truth – look out!”

— Agatha Christie

437. “Things go entirely differently from the way you planned them.”

— Agatha Christie

438. “To know when to use the truth is the essence of successful deception.”

— Agatha Christie

439. “It’s extraordinary, the amount of misunderstandings there are even between two people who discuss a thing quite often – both of them assuming different things and neither of them discovering the discrepancy.”

— Agatha Christie

440. “Time goes a different pace in different places. Some places you come back to, and you feel that time has been busting along at a terrific rate and that all sorts of things will have happened – and changed.”

— Agatha Christie

441. “Really, I have no gifts – no gifts at all – except perhaps a certain knowledge of human nature. People, I find, are apt to be far too trustful. I’m afraid that I have a tendency always to believe the worst. Not a nice trait. But so often justified by subsequent events.”

— Agatha Christie

442. “There’s no doubt about what the man’s profession has been. He’s a retired hairdresser. Look at that moustache of his.”

— Agatha Christie

443. “Women are fiends-absolute fiends.”

— Agatha Christie

444. “Elephants are quite enough.”

— Agatha Christie

445. “It is my experience that no one, in the course of conversation, can fail to give themselves away sooner or later. Everyone has an irresistible urge to talk about themselves.”

— Agatha Christie

446. “One of the oddest things in life, as we all know, is the way that when you have heard a thing mentioned, within twenty-four hours you nearly always come across it again.”

— Agatha Christie

447. “Madame, the most kind, the most amiable are not always the cleverest.”

— Agatha Christie

448. “Speech, so a wise old Frenchman said to me once, is an invention of man’s to prevent him from thinking. It is also an infallible means of discovering that which he wishes to hide.”

— Agatha Christie

449. “They’re like children, really. Only children are far more logical which makes it difficult sometimes with them. But these people are illogical, they want to be reassured by your telling them what they want to believe. Then they’re quite happy again for a bit.”

— Agatha Christie

450. “Murder, you see, is an amateur crime. I’m speaking of course of the kind of murder you have in mind – not gangster stuff. One feels, very often, as though these nice ordinary chaps had been overtaken, as it were, by murder, almost accidentally. They’ve been in a tight place, or they’ve wanted something very badly, money or a woman – and they’ve killed to get it. The brake that operates with most of us doesn’t operate with them.”

— Agatha Christie