Are you conscious of the restful influence which the stars exert? To me they are the most soothing things in Nature. I am proud to say that I don’t now the name of one of them. The glamour and romance would pass away from them if they were all classified and ticketed in one’s brain. But when man is hot and flurried, and full of his own little ruffled dignities and infinitesimal misfortunes, then a star bath is the finest thing in the world.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Romance
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
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
Once you eliminate the impossible,
whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Potential, Truth
When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Doctors
A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Business
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
The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Theory, Assumptions
There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Facts
It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Little Things, One Step at a Time, Happiness, Things
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
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
Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Facts
Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Science, Scientists, Nature
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
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
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: Books, Reading
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 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
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
Where there is no imagination there is no horror.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Evil
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
Topics: Mind
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
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: Facts, Mistakes
I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Laziness, Idleness
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
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
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
I never guess. It is a shocking habit—destructive to the logical faculty.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Assumptions
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Robert Louis Stevenson Scottish Novelist
- Walter Scott Scottish Novelist
- J. M. Barrie Scottish Novelist
- E. M. Forster English Novelist
- Hugh Walpole English Novelist
- Virginia Woolf English Novelist
- John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir Scottish Novelist
- Evelyn Waugh British Novelist, Satirist
- Margaret Drabble English Novelist
- P. G. Wodehouse English Novelist
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