Quote collection
426 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I think you want a little unofficial help. Three undetected murders in one year won't do, Lestrade. But you handled the Molesey Mystery with less than your usual - that's to say, you handled it fairly well."
"One dumb-bell, Watson! Consider an athlete with one dumb-bell. Picture to yourself the unilateral development - the imminent danger of a spinal curvature. Shocking, Watson, shocking!"
"...while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty."
"Violence is sometimes a duty."
"Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving. As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor."
"And yet the motives of women are so inscrutable. You remember the woman at Margate whom I suspected for the same reason. No powder on her nose - that proved to be the correct solution. How can you build on such a quicksand? Their most trivial action may mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin or a curling tongs."
"Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before."
"The mighty voice of Canada will ever call to me."
"You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable."
"It is horrible, yet fascinating, this struggle between a set purpose and an utterly exhausted frame."
"Steel True, Blade Straight *In 1955, Doyle's family sold Windlesham, which was turned into a hotel. The bodies of Conan Doyle and his wife, Jean, were moved to a grave at Minstead Churchyard, Hampshire."
"It is the sweetest spring within the memory of man. So green, so mild, so beautiful! Ah, what a contrast between nature without and my own soul so torn with doubt and terror!"
"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. [...] It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. [...] It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
"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."
"Oh how I've missed you, Holmes."
"You know how often the turning down this street or that, the accepting or rejecting of an invitation, may deflect the whole current of our lives into some other channel. Are we mere leaves, fluttered hither and thither by the wind, or are we rather, with every conviction that we are free agents, carried steadily along to a definite and pre-determined end?"
"There are no fools so troublesome as those who have some wit."
"What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done?"
"Everything comes in circles. [...] The old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes up. It's all been done before, and will be again."
"Let me run over the principal steps. We approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories. We were simply there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations."