Quotes from Arthur Conan Doyle

It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.

There is no satisfaction in vengeance unless the offender has time to realize who it is that strikes him, and why retribution has come upon him.

You wish to put me in the dark. I tell you that I will never be put in the dark. You wish to beat me. I tell you that you will never beat me.

Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.

Have you tried to drive a harpoon through a body? No? Tut, tut, my dear sir, you must really pay attention to these details.

Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.

What is the meaning of it, Watson? said Holmes solemnly as he laid down the paper. What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.

It is easy to be wise after the event.

Am dining at Goldini's Restaurant, Gloucester Road, Kensington. Please come at once and join me there. Bring with you a jemmy, a dark lantern, a chisel, and a revolver. S. H. It was a nice equipment for a respectable citizen to carry through the dim, fog-draped streets.

There is a soul-jealousy that can be as frantic as any body-jealousy.

It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.

When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

It seems to leave the darkness rather blacker than before.

Every man finds his limitations, Mr. Holmes, but at least it cures us of the weakness of self-satisfaction.

I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Homes, in one of his queer humours, would sit in an armchair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.

To underestimate oneself is as much an exaggeration of one's powers than the other.

Even the best of us are thrown off some- times.

It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?

I have taken to living by my wits.

You know, Watson, I don't mind confessing to you that I have always had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal.

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing... My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System.

The best way of successfully acting a part is to be it.

To begin at the beginning.

Some people's affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls.