Top 500 Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

152. “The love of books is among the choicest gifts of the gods.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

153. “Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau’s example.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

154. “The husband was a teetotaller, there was no other woman, and the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

155. “Of all ruins, that of a noble mind is the most deplorable.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

156. “From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

157. “But no chain is stronger than its weakest link.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

158. “I love and am loved by a better man than he.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

159. “You never tire of the moor. You cannot think the wonderful secrets which it contains. It is so vast, and so barren, and so mysterious.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

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

— Arthur Conan Doyle

161. “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.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

162. “Even the best of us are thrown off some- times.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

163. “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 instinct of beasts.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

164. “He burst into one of his rare fits of laughter as he turned away from the picture. I have not heard him laugh often, and it has always boded ill to somebody.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

165. “Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the inquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

166. “How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

167. “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. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

168. “He chuckled to himself and rubbed his long, nervous hands together.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

169. “Winwood Reade is good upon the subject,” said Holmes. “He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

170. “The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there’s no room for romance anywhere.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

171. “I may be very obtuse, Holmes, but I fail to see what this suggests.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

172. “His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

173. “Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

174. “It was easier to know it than to explain why I knew it.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

175. “You mentioned your name as if I should recognize it, but beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

176. “It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

177. “A man with so large a brain must have something in it.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

178. “I am inclined to think -? said I. ‘I should do so,’ Sherlock Holmes remarked impatiently.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

179. “When once your point of view is changed, the very thing which was so damning becomes a clue to the truth.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

180. “That which is clearly known hath less terror than that which is but hinted at and guessed.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

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

— Arthur Conan Doyle

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

— Arthur Conan Doyle

183. “I never remember feeling tired by work. though idleness exhausts me completely.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

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

— Arthur Conan Doyle

185. “My mind rebels at stagnation.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

186. “There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

187. “To that Providence, my sons, I hereby commend you, and I counsel you by way of caution to forbear from crossing the moor in those dark hours when the powers of evil are exalted.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

188. “It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

189. “To underestimate oneself is as much an exaggeration of one’s powers than the other.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

190. “The soul is swayed by the waters.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

191. “Violence is sometimes a duty.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

192. “Keep your revolver near you night and day, and never relax your precautions.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

193. “When people bury treasure nowadays they do it in the Post-Office bank.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

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

— Arthur Conan Doyle

195. “His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing... My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

196. “Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. It’s smell and it’s color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

197. “It is the sweetest spring within the memory of man. So green, so mild, so beautiful! Ah, what a contrast between nature without and my own soul so torn with doubt and terror!”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

198. “A gigantic tortoise with a jewel-encrusted shell was glittering near the window.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

199. “You have been in Afghanistan I perceive.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

200. “I knew perfectly well what it was over which he was brooding.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle