Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.

"My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world."

"Excellent!" I cried. "Elementary," said he.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

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.

I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.

To a great mind, nothing is little,' remarked Holmes, sententiously.

The game is afoot.

Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.

I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo
Ipse domi stimul ac nummos contemplar in arca.
(The public hiss at me, but I cheer myself when in my own house I contemplate the coins in my strong-box.)

There are always some lunatics about. It would be a dull world without them.

Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?'

'To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.'

'The dog did nothing in the night-time.'

'That was the curious incident,' remarked Sherlock Holmes.