Quotes by Arthur Conan Doyle

The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning.

I assure you, my good Lestrade, that I have an excellent reason for everything that I do.

When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals.

Holmes took up the stone and held it against the light. Its a bonny thing, said he. Just see how it glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime. Every good stone is. They are the devils pet baits. In the larger and older jewels every facet may stand for a bloody deed. This stone is not yet twenty years old. It was found in the banks of the Amoy River in soutern China and is remarkable in having every characteristic of the carbuncle, save that it is blue in shade instead of ruby red. In spite of its youth, it has already a sinister history. There have been two murders, a vitriol-throwing, a suicide, and several robberies brought about for the sake of this forty-grain weight of crystallised charcoal. Who would think that so pretty a toy would be a purveyor to the gallows and the prison?

The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when [Holmes] became a specialist in crime.

That hurts my pride, Watson. It is a petty feeling, no doubt, but it hurts my pride. It becomes a personal matter with me now...-Sherlock Holmes--The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Five Orange Pips-

He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city, He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans.

There are no crimes and no criminals in these days. What is the use of having brains in our profession? I know well that I have it in me to make my name famous. No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done. And what is the result? There is no crime to detect, or, at most, some bungling villainy with a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it.

I do not know whether it came from his own innate depravity or from the promptings of his master, but he was rude enough to set a dog at me. Neither dog nor man liked the look of my stick, however, and the matter fell through. Relations were strained after that, and further inquiries out of the question.

It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.

Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.

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

My job is to know what other people do not know.

I would not bring one shadow on his life, and this I know would break his noble heart.

To underestimate oneself is as much an exaggeration of ones powers than the other.

Some believe what separates men from animals is our ability to reason. Others say it’s language or romantic love, or opposable thumbs. Living here in this lost world, I’ve come to believe it is more than our biology. What truly makes us human is our unending search, our abiding desire for immortality.

I trust that age doth not wither nor custom stale my infinite variety.

Am dining at Goldinis Restaurant, Gloucester Road, Kensington. Please come at once and join me there. Bring with you a jemmy, a dark lantern, a chisel, and a revolver. S. H. It was a nice equipment for a respectable citizen to carry through the dim, fog-draped streets.

He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer- excellent for drawing the veil from mens motives and actions. But for the trained observer to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his.

The chief proof of mans real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.