"I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles."
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Arthur Conan Doyle quotes (page 7 of 22)
426 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
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"Come, Watson, come!" he cried. The game is afoot."
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"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."
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"It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery."
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"I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty."
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"The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest."
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"The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive."
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"Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting."
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"There is a danger there - a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?"
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"It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which set an edge to a man's energy."
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"Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there."
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"Just as an octopus may have his den in some ocean cave, and come floating out a silent image of horror to attack a swimmer, so I picture such a spirit lurking in the dark of the house which he curses by his presence, and ready to float out upon all whom he can injure."
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"It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognise out of a number of facts which are incidental and which are vital."
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"His neighbor is a tooth-drawer. That bag at his girdle is full of the teeth that he drew at Winchester fair. I warrant that there are more sound ones than sorry, for he is quick at his work and a trifle dim in the eye."
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"The more outré and grotesque an incident is the more carefully it deserves to be examined."
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"What a creature he was! Never have I felt such a horse between my knees. His great haunches gathered under him with every stride, and he shot forward ever faster and faster, stretched like a greyhound, while the windbeat in my face and whistled past my ears."
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"You know how easily and suddenly these things happen, beginning in playful teasing and ending in something a little warmer than friendship. You squeeze the slender arm which is passed through yours, you venture to take the little gloved hand, you say good night at absurd length in the shadow of the door. It is innocent and very interesting, love trying his wings in a first little flutter."
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"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."
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"The devil’s agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?"
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