Arthur Conan Doyle
Skill is fine, and genius is splendid, but the right contacts are more valuable than either.Collection: Skills
I'm not a psychopath, I'm a fully functioning sociopath. Do your research.Collection: Research
Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.Collection: Lessons
The love of books is among the choicest gifts of the gods.Collection: Inspirational
It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.Collection: Courage
Dogs don't make mistakes.Collection: Inspirational
There are always some lunatics about. It would be a dull world without them.Collection: Would Be
The chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.Collection: Real
Life, it turns out, is infinitely more clever and adaptable than anyone had ever supposed.Collection: Clever
The grand thing is to be able to reason backwards.Collection: Math
It’s every man’s business to see justice done.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Self
The unexpected has happened so continually in my life that it has ceased to deserve the name.Collection: Humorous
When once your point of view is changed, the very thing which was so damning becomes a clue to the truth.Collection: Views
No violence, gentlemen — no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture!Collection: Gentleman
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.Collection: Justice
You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.Collection: Method
Several incidents in my life have convinced me of spiritual interposition - of the promptings of some beneficent force outside ourselves, which tries to help us where it can.Collection: Spiritual
Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.Collection: Holmes
Critics kind never mind! Critics flatter no matter! Critics blame all the same! Do your best damn the rest!Collection: Mind
A fine thought in fine language is a most precious jewel, and should not be hid away, but be exposed for use and ornament.Collection: Jewels
Keep your revolver near you night and day, and never relax your precautions.Collection: Gun
I followed you.' I saw no one.' That is what you may expect to see when I follow you.Collection: May
It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.Collection: Education
Even the best of us are thrown off some- times.Collection: Thrown
We must look for consistency. Where there is a want of it we must suspect deception.Collection: Consistency
Yet birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when one of these harsh facts springs out upon a man at some sudden turn of the path of life, it dashes off for the moment his mask of civilization and gives a glimpse of the stranger and stronger face below.Collection: Spring
It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.Collection: Community
Of all ruins, that of a noble mind is the most deplorable.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Progress
Anything seems commonplace, once explained.Collection: Seems
We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination.Collection: Imagination
To a great mind, nothing is little,' remarked Holmes, sententiously.Collection: Mind
In shape they were like horrible toads, and moved in a succession of springs, but in size they were of an incredible bulk, larger than the largest elephant. We had never before seen them save at night, and indeed they are nocturnal animals save when disturbed in their lairs, as these had been. We now stood amazed at the sight, for their blotched and warty skins were of a curious fish-like iridescence, and the sunlight struck them with an ever-varying rainbow bloom as they moved.Collection: Spring
The highest morality may prove also to be the highest wisdom when the half-told story comes to be finished.Collection: Stories
Really, Watson, you excel yourself," said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. "I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.Collection: Light
Violence is sometimes a duty.Collection: Peace
It seems very strange ... that in the course of the world's history so obvious an improvement should never have been adopted. ... The next generation of Britishers would be the better for having had this extra hour of daylight in their childhood.Collection: Science
It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn. This murder would have been infinitely more difficult to unravel had the body of the victim been simply found lying in the roadway without any of those outré and sensational accompaniments which have rendered it remarkable. These strange details, far from making the case more difficult, have really had the effect of making it less so.Collection: Mistake
Steel True, Blade Straight.Collection: Tombstone
It is all in the way of professional experience.Collection: Way
Oh how I've missed you, Holmes.Collection: Missed You
There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.Collection: World
I love and am loved by a better man than he.Collection: Men
...it was a huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral. I have cross-examined these men, one of them a hard-headed countryman, one a farrier, and one a moorland farmer, who all tell the same story of this dreadful apparition, exactly corresponding to the hell-hound of the legend. I assure you that there is a reign of terror in the district, and that it is a hardy man who will cross the moor at night.Collection: Halloween
Steel True, Blade Straight *In 1955, Doyle's family sold Windlesham, which was turned into a hotel. The bodies of Conan Doyle and his wife, Jean, were moved to a grave at Minstead Churchyard, Hampshire.Collection: Family
I trust that age doth not wither nor custom stale my infinite variety.Collection: Humorous
I say, Watson,’ he whispered, ‘would you be afraid to sleep in the same room as a lunatic, a man with softening of the brain, an idiot whose mind has lost its grip?’ ‘Not in the least,’ I answered in astonishment. ‘Ah, that’s lucky,’ he said, and not another word would he utter that night.Collection: Sleep
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.Collection: Philosophy