“It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.”
Arthur Conan Doyle6 likes
“It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.”
“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
“A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.”
“There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.”
“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?' 'To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.' 'The dog did nothing in the night-time.' 'That was the curious incident,' remarked Sherlock Holmes.”
“There is nothing more unaesthetic than a policeman.”
“His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.”
“From the first day I met her, she was the only woman to me. Every day of that voyage I loved her more, and many a time since have I kneeled down in the darkness of the night watch and kissed the deck of that ship because I knew her dear feet had trod it. She was never engaged to me. She treated me as fairly as ever a woman treated a man. I have no complaint to make. It was all love on my side, and all good comradeship and friendship on hers. When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man.”
“It is easy to be wise after the event.”
“The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”
“I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland”
“It is only when you touch the higher that you realize how low we may be among the possibilities of creation.”
“The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest.”
“It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.”
“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”
“It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”
“There is a soul-jealousy that can be as frantic as any body-jealousy.”
“We can't command our love, but we can our actions.”
“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”
“The devil’s agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?”
“A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.”
“Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.”
“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
“Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.”
“Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau's example.”
“I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.”
“For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.”
“Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.”
“My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”
“Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.”
“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
“Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.”
“It is a pity he did not write in pencil. As you have no doubt frequently observed, the impression usually goes through -- a fact which has dissolved many a happy marriage.”
“I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.”
“Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
“The ideal reasoner, he remarked, would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.”
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
“Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.”
“Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.”
“To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”
“As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.”
“When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.”
“A man always finds it hard to realize that he may have finally lost a woman's love, however badly he may have treated her.”
“Where there is no imagination there is no horror.”
“A trusty comrade is always of use; and a chronicler still more so.”
“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?”
“It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”