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If in 100 years I am only known as the man who invented Sherlock Holmes then I will have considered my life a failure.

Arthur Conan Doyle

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Arthur Conan Doyle
Age: 71 †
Born: 1859
Born: May 22
Died: 1930
Died: July 7
Crime Writer
Essayist
Novelist
Physician
Physician Writer
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Edinburgh
Scotland
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
Sir A. Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan
Sir Doyle
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Invented
Considered
Failure
Known
Years
Men
Life
Sherlock
Holmes

More quotes by Arthur Conan Doyle

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Perhaps, when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.
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So it was, my dear Watson, that at two o'clock today I found myself in my old armchair in my own old room, and only wishing that I could have seen my old friend Watson in the other chair which he has so often adorned. - Sherlock Holmes.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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No: I am not tired. I have a curious constitution. I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely. ~ Sherlock Holmes
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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.
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It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognise out of a number of facts which are incidental and which are vital.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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I had ... come to an entirely erroneous conclusion, which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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He [Professor Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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I should be very much obliged if you would slip your revolver into your pocket. An Eley's No. 2 is an excellent argument with gentlemen who can twist steel pokers into knots. That and a tooth-brush are, I think, all that we need.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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The approach to the offices of Girdlestone and Co. was not a very dignified one, nor would the uninitiated who traversed it form any conception of the commercial prosperity of the firm in question.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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'It is my duty to warn you that it will be used against you,' cried the Inspector, with the magnificent fair play of the British criminal law.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing... My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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Healthy scepticism is the basis of all accurate observation.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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It is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though perhaps a meretricious, effect.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud stains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.
Arthur Conan Doyle