Arthur Conan Doyle
Three quiet days. This hell fiend is like a cat with a mouse. She lets me loose only to pounce upon me again. I am never so frightened as when every thing is still.Collection: Cat
The fair sex is your department.Collection: Sex
Let us hear the suspicions. I will look after the proofs.Collection: Looks
It is the sweetest spring within the memory of man. So green, so mild, so beautiful! Ah, what a contrast between nature without and my own soul so torn with doubt and terror!Collection: Beautiful
It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy. It cost one man his reason, it cost me a blood-letting, and it cost yet another man the penalties of the law. Yet there was certainly an element of comedy. Well, you shall judge for yourselves.Collection: Men
It is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though perhaps a meretricious, effect.Collection: Book
Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before.Collection: Morning
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.Collection: Book
An absence of antecedents and of relatives is sometimes an aid rather than an impediment to social advancement . . .Collection: Humorous
It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.Collection: Skulls
It was easier to know it than to explain why I know it. If you were asked to prove that two and two made four, you might find some difficulty, and yet you are quite sure of the fact. ~ Sherlock HolmesCollection: Two
If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive.Collection: Alive
"I should have more faith," he said; "I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears opposed to a long train of deductions it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation."Collection: Faith
It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high and allow you to look down upon the houses like this." I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself. "Look at those big, isolated clumps of buildings rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea." "The board-schools." "Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.Collection: Running
I do hate the City of London! It is the only thing which ever comes between us.Collection: Hate
There is but one step from the grotesque to the horrible.Collection: Steps
If I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one.Collection: Literature
The husband was a teetotaller, there was no other woman, and the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife.Collection: Husband
...while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.Collection: Men
Conceive a jelly-fish such as sails in our summer seas, bell-shaped and of enormous size - far larger, I should judge, than the dome of St. Paul's. It was of a light pink colour veined with a delicate green, but the whole huge fabric so tenuous that it was but a fairy outline against the dark blue sky. It pulsated with a delicate and regular rhythm. From it there depended two long drooping, green tentacles, which swayed slowly backwards and forwards. This gorgeous vision passed gently with noiseless dignity over my head, as light and fragile as a soap-bubble, and drifted upon its stately way.Collection: Summer
Might I trouble you to open the window, for chloroform vapour does not help the palate.Collection: Humorous
You say that your fare told you that he was a detective?" "Yes, he did." "When did he say this?" "When he left me." "Did he say anything more?" "He mentioned his name." Holmes cast a swift glance of triumph at me. "Oh, he mentioned his name, did he? That was imprudent. What was the name that he mentioned?" “His name," said the cabman, "was Mr. Sherlock Holmes.Collection: Names
Too much! Wait till you have lived here longer. Look down the valley! See the cloud of a hundred chimneys that overshadows it! I tell you that the cloud of murder hangs thicker and lower than that over the heads of the people. It is the Valley of Fear, the Valley of Death. The terror is in the hearts of the people from the dusk to the dawn. Wait, young man, and you will learn for yourself.Collection: Heart
Life, my dear Watson, is infinitely stranger than fiction; stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We could not conceive the things that are merely commonplace to existence. If we could hover over this great city, remove the roofs, and peep in at the things going on, it would make all fiction, with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions flat, stale and unprofitable.Collection: Men
Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details.Collection: Boys
The mighty voice of Canada will ever call to me.Collection: Voice
The good Watson had at that time deserted me for a wife, the only selfish action I can recall in our association. I was alone.Collection: Selfish
The weak man becomes strong when he has nothing, for then only can he feel the wild, mad thrill of despair.Collection: Strong
To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the countryside, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year, Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed, The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation--sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles.Collection: Beautiful
Far away on the path we saw Sir Henry looking back, his face white in the moonlight, his hands raised in horror, glaring helplessly at the frightful thing which was hunting him down. But that cry of pain from the hound had blown all our fears to the winds. If he was vulnerable he was mortal, and if we could wound him we could kill him. Never have I seen a man run as Holmes ran that night.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Light
There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.Collection: Book
I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.Collection: Speak
To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.Collection: Racing
…but it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all.Collection: Holmes
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.Collection: Believe
There are no fools so troublesome as those who have some wit.Collection: Mind
Work is the best antidote to sorrow, my dear Watson.Collection: Sorrow
I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.Collection: Brain
My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people do not know.Collection: Business
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!Collection: Sweet
Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it.Collection: Hands
You cannot see the lettuce and the dressing without suspecting a salad.Collection: Salad
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.Collection: Giving
It is not that I think or believe, but that I know.Collection: Believe
The future was with Fate. The present was our own.Collection: Fate
One must wait till it comes.Collection: Waiting
It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.Collection: Life