Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

Nothing is little to a great mind.

"One of the most dangerous classes in the world," said he, "is the drifting and friendless woman. She is the most harmless and often the most useful of mortals, but she is the inevitable inciter of crime in others. She is helpless. She is migratory. She has sufficient means to take her from country to country and from hotel to hotel. She is lost, as often as not, in a maze of obscure pensions and boardinghouses. She is a stray chicken in a world of foxes. When she is gobbled up she is hardly missed."

"How do you know that?"
"I followed you."
"I saw no one."
"That is what you may expect to see when I follow you."

It might have driven me mad; but I was always a pretty stubborn one, so I just held on and bided my time.

Holmes, you have an answer to everything

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.

"What do you think of this, Holmes? Sholto was, on his own confession, with his brother last night. The brother died in a fit, on which Sholto walked off with the treasure? How's that?"
"On which the dead man very considerately got up and locked the door on the inside."

...I object to rows because my nerves are shaken, and I get up at all sorts of ungodly hours, and I am extremely lazy. I have another set of vices when I'm well, but those are the principal ones at present.

There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world.

My wife was on a visit to her aunt's, and for a few days I was a dweller once more in my old quarters at Baker Street.
'Why,' said I, glancing up at my companion, 'that was surely the bell? Who could come tonight? Some friend of yours, perhaps?'
'Except yourself I have none,' he answered. 'I do not encourage visitors.

He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and 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.

"I have the advantage of knowing your habits, my dear Watson," said he. "When your round is a short one you walk, and when it is a long one you use a hansom. As I perceive that your boots, although used, are by no means dirty, I cannot doubt that you are at present busy enough to justify the hansom."
"Excellent!" I cried.
"Elementary," said he. "It is one of those instances where the reasoner can produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbour, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction. The same may be said, my dear fellow, for the effect of some of these little sketches of yours, which is entirely meretricious, depending as it does upon your retaining in your own hands some factors in the problem which are never imparted to the reader."

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.

"My brain has always governed my heart" Sherlock Holmes

"A most painful matter to me, as you can most readily imagine, Mr Holmes. I have been cut to the quick. I understand you have already managed several delicate cases of this sort, sir, though I presume that they were hardly from the same class of society'
'No, I am descending.'
'I beg pardon?'
'My last client of the sort was a King.'
'Oh really! I had no idea. And which king?'
'The King of Scandinavia'
'What! Had he lost his wife?'
'You can understand", said Holmes suavely, 'that I extend to the affairs of my other clients the same secrecy which I promise to you in yours.