Quotes from Arthur Conan Doyle

Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau's example.

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

Dogmas of every kind put assertion in the place of reason and give rise to more contention, bitterness, and want of charity than any other influence in human affairs.

The mighty voice of Canada will ever call to me.

You are my heart, my life, my one and only thought.

…but it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all.

I could not rest, Watson, I could not sit quiet in my chair, if I thought that such a man as Professor Moriarty were walking the streets of London unchallenged.

Holy Men! Holy Cabbages! Holy Bean Pods! What do they do but live and suck in sustenance and grow fat?

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.

A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.

It was all love on my side, and all good comradeship and friendship on hers. When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man.

As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.

If in 100 years I am only known as the man who invented Sherlock Holmes then I will have considered my life a failure.

What one man can invent, another can discover.

All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience.

It's a wicked world, and when a clever man turns his brain to crime it is the worst of all.

Nature is the true revelation of the Deity to man. The nearest green field is the inspired page from which you may read all that it is needful for you to know.

A man with so large a brain must have something in it.

...while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.

A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem.

It isn't true that the laws of nature have been capriciously disturbed; that snakes have talked; that women have been turned into salt; that rods have brought water out of rocks.

They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," he remarked with a smile. "It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.

Work is the best antidote to sorrow, my dear Watson.

My mind rebels at stagnation, give me problems, give me work!