Quotes from Arthur Conan Doyle

I have already explained to you that what is out of the common is usually a guide rather than a hindrance.There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can read analytically.

Human nature is a strange mixture, Watson. You see that even a villain and murderer can inspire such affection that his brother turns to suicide when he learns that his neck is forfeited.

Pshaw, my dear boy! it was simplicity itself.

you know a conjurer gets no credit when once he has explained his trick and if I show too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all. -Sherlock Holmes

What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence, the question is what you can make people believe that you have done.

A fortune for one man that was more than he needed should not be build on ten thousand ruined men who were left without the means of life.

His eyes kindled and a slight flush sprang into his thin cheeks. For an instant the veil had lifted upon his keen, intense nature, but for an instant only. When I glanced again his face had resumed that red-Indian composure which had made so many regard him as a machine rather than a man.

Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.

Toby proved to an ugly, long-haired, lop-eared creature, half spaniel and half lurcher, brown-and-white in colour, with a very clumsy waddling gait.

The greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every deviltry, the controlling brain of the underworld, a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of nations—that's the man! But so aloof is he from general suspicion, so immune from criticism, so admirable in his management and self-effacement, that for those very words that you have uttered he could hale you to a court and emerge with your year's pension as a solatium for his wounded character.

Goethe is always pithy.

It is all very well to say that a man is clever, but the reader wants to see examples of it...