Top 500 Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Well,” said Lestrade, “I’ve seen you handle a good many cases, Mr. Holmes, but I don’t know that I ever knew a more workmanlike one than that. We’re not jealous of you at Scotland Yard. No, sir, we are very proud of you, and if you come down to-morrow, there’s not a man, from the oldest inspector to the youngest constable, who wouldn’t be glad to shake you by the hand.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

352. “Now, Watson, confess yourself utterly taken aback,” said he. “I am.” “I ought to make you sign a paper to that effect.” “Why?” “Because in five minutes you will say that it is all so absurdly simple.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

353. “However, wretch as he was, he was still living under the shield of British law, and I have no doubt, Inspector, that you will see that, though that shield may fail to guard, the sword of justice is still there to avenge.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

354. “Holy Men! Holy Cabbages! Holy Bean Pods! What do they do but live and suck in sustenance and grow fat?”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

355. “It is hard luck on a young fellow to have expensive tastes, great expectations, aristocratic connections but no actual money in his pocket, and no profession by which he may earn any.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

356. “Lying across his chest was a curious weapon, a shotgun with the barrel sawed off a foot in front of the triggers. It was clear that this had been fired at close range and that he had received the whole charge in the face, blowing his head almost to pieces. The triggers had been wired together, so as to make the simultaneous discharge more destructive.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

357. “She was as good as she was beautiful and as intelligent as she was good.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

358. “I am inclined to think – ” said I. “I should do so,” Sherlock Holmes remarked impatiently. I believe that I am one of the most long-suffering of mortals; but I’ll admit that I was annoyed at the sardonic interruption. “Really, Holmes,” said I severely, “you are a little trying at times.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

359. “THE POWER OF detaching his mind at will.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

360. “I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

361. “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

362. “Every man finds his limitations, Mr. Holmes, but at least it cures us of the weakness of self-satisfaction.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

363. “Because it is done by a man who cannot afford to fail, one whose whole unique position depends upon the fact that all he does must succeed. A great brain and a huge organization have been turned to the extinction of one man. It is crushing the nut with the triphammer – an absurd extravagance of energy – but the nut is very effectually crushed all the same.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

364. “I follow my own methods, and tell as much or as little as I choose. That is the advantage of being unofficial.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

365. “Draw your chair up, and hand me my violin, for the only problem which we have still to solve is how to while away these bleak autumnal evenings.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

366. “Just see how it glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime. Every good stone is. They are the devil.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

367. “Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

368. “On general principles, it is best that I should not leave the country. Scotland Yard feels lonely without me, and it causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

369. “It is horrible, yet fascinating, this struggle between a set purpose and an utterly exhausted frame.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

370. “Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson,” said Holmes in a reminiscent voice. “It was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

371. “I fear that I bore you with these details, but I have to let you see my little difficulties, if you are to understand the situation.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

372. “Well, I’m a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

373. “He foresaw that she would be very much more useful to him in the character of a free woman.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

374. “But there was something in the ice-cold reasoning of Holmes which made it impossible to shrink from any adventure which he might recommend. One knew that thus, and only thus, could a solution be found. I clasped his hand in silence, and the die was cast.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

375. “The Times is a paper which is seldom found in any hands but those of the highly educated.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

376. “My uncle, Mr. Stephen Maple, had been at the same time the most successful and the least respectable of our family, so that we hardly knew whether to take credit for his wealth or to feel ashamed of his position.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

377. “Should I ever marry, Watson, I should hope to inspire my wife with some feeling which would prevent her from being walked off by a housekeeper when my corpse was lying within a few yards of her.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

378. “My friend had no breakfast himself, for it was one of his peculiarities that in his more intense moments he would permit himself no food, and I have known him presume upon his iron strength until he has fainted from pure inanition. “At present I cannot spare energy and nerve force for digestion,” he would say in answer to my medical remonstrance.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

379. “I have never loved, Watson, but if I did and if the woman I loved had met such an end, I might act even as our lawless lion-hunter has done.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

380. “I must really apologize, Hopkins,” said Sherlock Holmes. “I fear that the scrambled eggs are cold. However, you will enjoy the rest of your breakfast all the better, will you not, for the thought that you have brought your case to a triumphant conclusion.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

381. “The truly inspired priest is the man or woman with the big brain. It.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

382. “I have my own views about Nature’s methods, though I feel that it is rather like a beetle giving his.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

383. “Exactly, Watson. Pathetic and futile. But is not all life pathetic and futile? Is not his story a microcosm of the whole? We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow – misery.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

384. “She could but refuse me, and better be a repulsed lover than an accepted brother.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

385. “Streams may spring from one source and yet some may be clear and some be foul.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

386. “I should like to meet him,” I said. “If I am to lodge with anyone, I should prefer a man of studious and quiet habits. I am not strong enough yet to stand much noise or excitement. I had enough of both in Afghanistan to last me for the remainder of my natural existence. How could I meet this friend of yours?”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

387. “Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

388. “What have you to confess now? It’s just as well for two fellows to know the worst of one another before they begin to live together.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

389. “There is but one step from the grotesque to the horrible.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

390. “It was a tremendously virile and yet sinister face which was turned towards us. With the brow of a philosopher above and the jaw of a sensualist below, the man must have started with great capacities for good or for evil. But one could not look upon his cruel blue eyes, with their drooping, cynical lids, or upon the fierce, aggressive nose and the threatening, deep-lined brow, without reading Nature’s plainest danger-signals.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

391. “Perhaps, when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

392. “When you have one of the first brains of Europe up against you, and all the powers of darkness at his back, there are infinite possibilities.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

393. “Yes, it is an interesting instance of a throwback, which appears to be both physical and spiritual.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

394. “As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

395. “One dumb-bell, Watson! Consider an athlete with one dumb-bell. Picture to yourself the unilateral development – the imminent danger of a spinal curvature. Shocking, Watson, shocking!”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

396. “Was it hardness, was it selfishness, that she should ask me to risk my life for her own glorification? Such thoughts may come to middle age; but never to ardent three-and-twenty in the fever of his first love.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

397. “Kalau kausingkirkan semua yang mustahil, apa pun yang tersisa, betapapun mustahilnya, adalah kebenaran.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

398. “It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

399. “All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

400. “Round-headed,” he muttered. “Brachycephalic, gray-eyed, black-haired, with suggestion of the negroid. Celtic, I presume?”

— Arthur Conan Doyle