Quotes from Arthur Conan Doyle

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

Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.

But love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things.

Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.

One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature

A study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon? There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.

It is more than possible; it is probable.

I am lost without my Boswell. [Sherlock Holmes on Dr. Watson.]

He said that there were no traces upon the ground round the body. He did not observe any. but I did - some little distance off, but fresh and clear Footprints? Footprints. A man's or a woman's? Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered: Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of s gigantic hound!

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name.

He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of 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. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans.

I must apologize for calling so late, said he, and I must further beg you to be so unconventional as to allow me to leave your house presently by scrambling over your back garden wall.

When a man does a queer thing, or two queer things, there may be a meaning to it, but when everything he does is queer, then you begin to wonder

That which is clearly known hath less terror than that which is but hinted at and guessed.

I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air -- or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.

There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.

Really, Watson, you excel yourself, said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.

His incredible untidiness, his addiction to music at strange hours, his occasional revolver practice within doors, his weird and often malodorous scientific experiments, and the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung around him made him the very worst tenant in London.

I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge.

This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.

Let me see. What are my other shortcomings?

We must look for consistency. Where there is a want of it we must suspect deception.

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.