Quotes from Arthur Conan Doyle

A bicycle, certainly, but not THE bicycle," said he. "I am familiar with forty-two different impressions left by tires. This, as you perceive, is a Dunlop, with a patch upon the outer cover. Heidegger's tires were Palmer's, leaving longitudinal stripes. Aveling, the mathematical master, was sure upon the point. Therefore, it is not Heidegger's track.

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 a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the

If she were seventeen at the time of her father's disappearance she must be seven-and-twenty now--a sweet age, when youth has lost its self-consciousness and become a little sobered by experience.

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. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.

Come, Watson, we must really take a risk and try to investigate this a little more closely.

You seem to have powers that are hardly human

When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man.

Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

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.

In height he was rather over six feet, and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller. His eyes were sharp and piercing, save during those intervals of torpor to which I have alluded; and his thin, hawk-like nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness and decision. His chin, too, had the prominence and squareness which mark the man of determination.

Holmes held out a small chip with the letters NN and a space of clear wood after them.