Quotes from Arthur Conan Doyle

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

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?

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

My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill.

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

Come, Watson, come!' he cried. 'The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!' Ten minutes later we were both in a cab and rattling through the silent streets on our way to Charing Cross Station.

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.

Jealousy is a strange transformer of characters.

Desultory readers are seldom remarkable for the exactness of their learning.

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

When a man writes on a wall, his instinct leads him to write above the level of his own eyes.

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.

Accounts are not quite settled between us, said she, with a passion that equaled my own. I can love, and I can hate. You had your choice. You chose to spurn the first; now you must test the other.

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.

I should be very much obliged if you would slip your revolver into your pocket. An Eley's No. 2 is an excellent argument with gentlemen who can twist steel pokers into knots. That and a tooth-brush are, I think, all that we need.

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

To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the countryside, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year, Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed, The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation--sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles.

Only that I insist upon your dining with us. It will be ready in half an hour. I have oysters and a brace of grouse, with something a little choice in white wines. Watson, you have never yet recognized my merits as a housekeeper. ~ Sherlock Holmes

It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles.

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

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

For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain.

How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!

You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.