Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

I observe that there is a good deal of German music on the programme, which is rather more to my taste than Italian or French. It is introspective, and I want to introspect.

The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest.

Watson: When do we start?
Holmes: You are not coming.
Watson: Then you are not going. I give you my word of honour - and I never broke it in my life - that I will take a cab straight to the police station and give you away unless you let me share this adventure with you.

A strange enigma is man

Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.

"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. It was a fine, thick piece of wood, bulbous-headed, of the sort which is known as a "Penang lawyer." Just under the head was a broad silver band nearly an inch across. "To James Mortimer, M.R.C.S., from his friends of the C.C.H.," was engraved upon it, with the date "1884." It was just such a stick as the old-fashioned family practitioner used to carry — dignified, solid, and reassuring."

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

~ The Poison Belt

The ideal reasoner would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also the results which would follow from it.

He burst into one of his rare fits of laughter as he turned away from the picture. I have not heard him laugh often, and it has always boded ill to somebody.

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

It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs

"I think that I had better go, Holmes."
"Not a bit, doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell."

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.

You yourself may not be luminous, but you are a conductor of light.

Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l'admire.

A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him.