Arthur Conan Doyle
Writer, Physician
"You see, but you do not observe."
Detectives quotes
Detectives
91 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Carolyn Wells
Author
"Where there's a will there's a detective story."
Robert Kiyosaki
Businessman, Author
"To be a good detective you must also think like a crook, an immoral, unethical or unlawful person"
Douglas Adams
Writer, Humorist
"I am a private detective. I am paid to be inquisitive and presumptuous."
George Santayana
Philosopher, Poet
"Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained."
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Detectives quotes (page 1 of 5)
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"It is difficult to distinguish deduction from what in other circumstances is called problem-solving. And concept learning, inference, and reasoning by analogy are all instances of inductive reasoning. (Detectives typically induce, rather than deduce.) None of these things can be done separately from each other, or from anything else. They are pseudo-categories."
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"A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive."
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"This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot."
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"I told him about me being a summoner, and what that entailed. At the end of he simply gave a long sigh. “Why couldn’t you simply be an alcoholic like all the other detectives?” I grinned. “Demon summoning has less vomiting!"
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"In detective stories . . . I alternately identify myself with the murderer and the huntsman-detective, but . . . there are those to which this vicarious outlet is too mild."
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"[T]he historian and the detective have much in common."
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"I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there´s the true, preestablished balance."
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"I'd love to do a Columbo-type detective character in a series."
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"I love the French detective series 'Spiral.' It's quite brutal to watch, but I'm already hooked."
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