Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Arthur Conan Doyle (Scottish Writer)

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930,) fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, was a Scottish writer of detective stories and historical romances. He is best known for his creation of the detective Sherlock Holmes—one of the most vivid and enduring characters in English fiction.

Born of Irish ancestry in Edinburgh, Conan Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Early poverty as a young practitioner in the South Seas and as an oculist in London persuaded him into writing. A Study in Scarlet (1887) introduced Sherlock Holmes and his genial friend Dr. John Watson. Conan Doyle based Sherlock Holmes as the master of diagnostic deduction on medical school professor Dr. Joseph Bell, who observed the minutest details about a patient’s condition.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes were serialized in the Strand Magazine 1891–93 and later published as books, as were longer stories such as The Sign of Four (1890) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902.) The Holmes narratives became so well-liked that when Conan Doyle tried to put an end to his protagonist, he was obliged in 1903 to revive him.

Conan Doyle’s historical romances Micah Clarke (1887,) The White Company (1890,) Brigadier Gerard (1896,) and Sir Nigel (1906) have at least as much literary merit, and Rodney Stone (1896) is perhaps one of his best novels.

Conan Doyle also wrote works of nonfiction, including military writings such as The Great Boer War (1900) and The War in South Africa (1902,) in addition to the autobiographies Memories and Adventures (1924) and Through the Magic Door (1907.)

After converting from Roman Catholicism to spiritualism, Conan Doyle devoted the rest of his life and career to propagating his new faith in a series of works: The New Revelation (1918,) The Vital Message (1919,) The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (1921,) and History of Spiritualism (1926.) From 1917–25, he lectured on spiritualism all over Europe, Australia, the United States, and Canada.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Arthur Conan Doyle

I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Laziness, Idleness

Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Science, Scientists, Nature

All other men are specialists, but his specialty is omniscience.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Learning

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. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Problems

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
—Arthur Conan Doyle

There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Facts

The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Theory, Assumptions

It was all love on my side, and all good comradeship and friendship on hers. When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man.
—Arthur Conan Doyle

Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult is it to bring it home.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Crime

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
Topics: Logic

The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Britain

Clouds of insects danced and buzzed in the golden autumn light, and the air was full of the piping of the song-birds. Long, glinting dragonflies shot across the path, or hung tremulous with gauzy wings and gleaming bodies.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Autumn

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
Topics: Libraries

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
Topics: Knowledge

Once you eliminate the impossible,
whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Truth, Potential

I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Things, Little Things

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Happiness, Things, Little Things, One Step at a Time

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Life and Living

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’s pet baits.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Crime

Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Romance

A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Business

Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Violence

When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Doctors

There is nothing more unaesthetic than a policeman.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Police, Control

Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud stains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Education

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
Topics: Mistakes, Facts

The most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Appearance

I never guess. It is a shocking habit—destructive to the logical faculty.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Assumptions

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 instincts of beasts.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Aspirations

You will, I am sure, agree with me that… if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Reading, Books

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