Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instinct of beasts.

To begin at the beginning.

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 suppose I shall have to compound a felony, as usual.

I never guess. It is a shocking habit - destructive to the logical faculty.

I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.

"Holmes took up the stone and held it against the light. "It's 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 devil's 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?

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

"Because it is my desire. Is that not enough?"

[Sherlock Holmes on his raison d'être.]

So we stood hand-in-hand, like two children, and there was peace in our hearts for all the dark things that surrounded us.

Watson, you can see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you see.

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

My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built. Life is commonplace; the papers are sterile; audacity and romance seem to have passed forever from the criminal world. Can you ask me, then, whether I am ready to look into any new problem, however trivial it may prove?

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.

He seems to have declared war on the King’s English as well as on the English king.