Top 500 Agatha Christie Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “And most conveniently she leaves her handkerchief behind!” said Poirot. “Exactly as it happens in the books and on the films – and to make things even easier for us it is marked with an initial.”

— Agatha Christie

402. “When will a woman lie? Sometimes for herself. Usually for the man she loves. Always for her children.”

— Agatha Christie

403. “Juliet singles out Romeo. Desdemona claims Othello. They have no doubts, the young, no fear, no pride.”

— Agatha Christie

404. “You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.”

— Agatha Christie

Featured in: Reading Quotes, Quotes About Stories

405. “Servants must be treated with the utmost courtesy. They are doing skilled work which you could not possibly do yourself without long training. And remember they cannot answer back. You must always be polite to people whose position forbids them to be rude to you. If you are impolite, they will despise you, and rightly, because you have not acted like a lady.”

— Agatha Christie

406. “Me and Moosier here have met before – and there’s no man’s judgment I’d sooner take than his. If I’m not greatly mistaken, he’s got something up his sleeve. Isn’t that so, moosier?” Poirot smiled. “I have drawn certain conclusions – yes.”

— Agatha Christie

407. “But afterwards you went on remembering.”

— Agatha Christie

408. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

412. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

414. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

416. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

424. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

430. “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

431. “Women are fiends-absolute fiends.”

— Agatha Christie

432. “Elephants are quite enough.”

— Agatha Christie

433. “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

434. “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

435. “I have often had occasion to notice how, where a direct question would fail to elicit a response, a false assumption brings instant information in the form of a contradiction.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

437. “For sheer primitive rage, commend me to a thoroughgoing humanitarian when you get him well roused.”

— Agatha Christie

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

443. “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

444. “One place is very like another.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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