Arthur Conan Doyle

“You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.”

“It is easy to be wise after the event.”

“Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.”

“Watson. Come at once if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same.”

“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”

“Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.”

“There are always some lunatics about. It would be a dull world without them.”

“What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is what can you make people believe you have done.”

“Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill.”

“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.”

“Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence—‘This account of you we have from all quarters received.’ A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs.”

“It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?”

“It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.”

“The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

“The bent head, the averted eye, the faltering voice, the wincing figure- these, and not the unshrinking gaze and frank reply, are the true signals of passion.”

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”

“My mind," he said, "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. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”

“She was as good as she was beautiful and as intelligent as she was good.”

“Anything is better than stagnation.”

“One likes to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange, impossible place where the beaux of Fielding may still make love to the belles of Richardson, where Scott’s heroes still may strut, Dickens’s delightful Cockneys still raise a laugh, and Thackeray’s worldlings continue to carry on their reprehensible careers. Perhaps in some humble corner of such a Valhalla, Sherlock and his Watson may for a time find a place, while some more astute sleuth with some even less astute comrade may fill the stage which they have vacated.”