Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Facts
There is nothing more unaesthetic than a policeman.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Police
The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Britain
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. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
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.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Knowledge
The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Theory
All other men are specialists, but his specialty is omniscience.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Learning
Just see how it glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime. Every good stone is. They are the devil’s pet baits.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Crime
I 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.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Once you eliminate the impossible,
whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Potential, Truth
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Mistakes, Facts
Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult is it to bring it home.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Crime
There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Facts
Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Nature, Science
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
What can we know?. What are we all?. Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Aspirations
Where there is no imagination there is no horror.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Evil
It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: One Step at a Time, Happiness
Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Violence
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.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Libraries
I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Idleness
Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Life and Living
The most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Appearance
There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
You will, I am sure, agree with me that… if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
Topics: Reading, Books
When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
I never guess. It is a shocking habit — destructive to the logical faculty.
—Arthur Conan Doyle
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