Top 430 Quotes & Sayings by Arthur Conan Doyle - Page 2

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

It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.

Dogmas of every kind put assertion in the place of reason and give rise to more contention, bitterness, and want of charity than any other influence in human affairs.

The grand thing is to be able to reason backwards.

There's a light in a woman's eyes that speaks louder than words.

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.

Do you know anything on earth which has not a dangerous side if it is mishandled and exaggerated?

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

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

You cannot see the lettuce and the dressing without suspecting a salad.

You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.

How sweet the morning air is! ...How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!

To a great mind, nothing is little,' remarked Holmes, sententiously.

It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery.

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

I have mastered the principles of several religions. They have all shocked me by the violence which I should have to do to my reason to accept the dogmas of any one of them.

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

The soul is swayed by the waters.

It’s every man’s business to see justice done.

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

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

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.

I had ... come to an entirely erroneous conclusion, which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data.

There are no fools so troublesome as those who have some wit.

My dear Watson," said [Sherlock Holmes], "I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one's self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one's own powers.

I carry my own church about under my own hat," said I. "Bricks and mortar won't make a staircase to heaven. I believe with your Master that the human heart is the best temple.

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

To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.

So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.

…but it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all.

There are times, young fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right and justice, or you never feel clean again.

My mind rebels at stagnation, give me problems, give me work!

The future was with Fate. The present was our own.

The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning.

I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge.

Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it.

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

If in 100 years I am only known as the man who invented Sherlock Holmes then I will have considered my life a failure.

It is more than possible; it is probable.

The chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.

We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination.

When such men, who are beyond hope and fear, begin in their dim minds to see the source their woes, it may be an evil time for those who have wronged them. The weak man becomes strong when he has nothing, for then only can he feel the wild, mad thrill of despair.

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.

At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society.

His sanguine spirit turns every firefly into a star.

Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.

No violence, gentlemen — no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture!

Anything seems commonplace, once explained.

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

You wish to put me in the dark. I tell you that I will never be put in the dark. You wish to beat me. I tell you that you will never beat me.

When we think how narrow and devious this path of nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great and terrible possibilities loom ever shadowly upwards, it is a bold and a confident man who will put a limit to the strange by-oaths into which the human spirit may wander.

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

There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.

I wanted to end the world but,I'll settle for ending yours.

There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. 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. Its smell and its colour 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.

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

It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.

There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror.

Some people's affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls.

Jealousy is a strange transformer of characters.