Top 500 Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You see, but you do not observe.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

2. “Work is the best antidote to sorrow, my dear Watson.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

3. “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

Featured in: Math Quotes

4. “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

5. “My mind rebels at stagnation, give me problems, give me work!”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

6. “When the impossible has been eliminated, all that remains no matter how improbable is possible.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

7. “I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

Featured in: Science Quotes

8. “My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people do not know.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

9. “Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

10. “Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

11. “I’m not a psychopath, I’m a fully functioning sociopath. Do your research.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

12. “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

13. “How dangerous it is to reason from insufficient data.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

14. “Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

15. “My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

Featured in: Quotes About Work

16. “Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

17. “You are my heart, my life, my one and only thought.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

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

— Arthur Conan Doyle

19. “It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

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

— Arthur Conan Doyle

Featured in: Quotes About the Brain

21. “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

22. “When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

23. “I don’t speak for others and they don’t speak for me.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

24. “It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

25. “It is not that I think or believe, but that I know.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

26. “The grand thing is to be able to reason backwards.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

27. “The game is afoot.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

28. “Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

29. “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

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

— Arthur Conan Doyle

31. “There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

Featured in: Reading Quotes

32. “There are always some lunatics about. It would be a dull world without them.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

33. “When you have eliminated the impossible, what is left, no matter how unlikely, is the truth.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

34. “What one man can invent, another can discover.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

35. “The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

36. “Let me run over the principal steps. We approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories. We were simply there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

37. “Skill is fine, and genius is splendid, but the right contacts are more valuable than either.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

38. “Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

39. “Desultory readers are seldom remarkable for the exactness of their learning.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

Featured in: Reading Quotes

40. “Anything seems commonplace, once explained.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

41. “You know my methods. Apply them.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

42. “If the fresh facts come to our knowledge all fit themselves into the scheme, then our hypothesis may gradually become a solution. Sherlock Holmes speaking with Dr. Watson.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

43. “It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

44. “Life, it turns out, is infinitely more clever and adaptable than anyone had ever supposed.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

45. “Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

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

— Arthur Conan Doyle

47. “The best way of successfully acting a part is to be it.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

Featured in: Quotes About Acting

48. “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

Featured in: Virtue Quotes

49. “The unexpected has happened so continually in my life that it has ceased to deserve the name.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

50. “His sanguine spirit turns every firefly into a star.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle