Arthur Conan Doyle

Writer

1859-05-22 – 1930-07-07

Arthur Conan Doyle was a Scottish writer and physician best known for creating Sherlock Holmes. He was born in Edinburgh on 1859-05-22 and became one of the most influential crime-fiction authors in English literature. He died in Crowborough, England, on 1930-07-07.

Books by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Sign of Four
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A Study in Scarlet
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The Lost World
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Quotes by Arthur Conan Doyle

My correspondence has certainly the charm of variety, and the humbler are usually the more interesting. This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.
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Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.
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Over the green squares of the fields and the low curves of a wood there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance like some fantastic landscape in a dream. Baskerville sat for a long time, his gaze fixed upon it, and I read upon his eager face how much it meant to him, this first sight of that strange spot where the men of his blood had held sway so long and left their mark so deep.
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Accounts are not quite settled between us, said she, with a passion that equaled my own. I can love, and I can hate. You had your choice. You chose to spurn the first; now you must test the other.
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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.
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It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.
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(...) My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built.
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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.
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A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.
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There is nothing more to be said or to be done tonight, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellowmen.
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To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces. The sea air, sunshine, and patience, Watson— all else will come.
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Miss Morstan and I stood together, and her hand was in mine. A wondrous subtle thing is love, for here were we two, who had never seen each other until that day, between whom no word or even look of affection had ever passed, and yet now in an hour of trouble our hands instinctively sought for each other. I have marveled at it since, but at the time it seemed the most natural thing that I would go out to her so, and, as she has often told me, there was in her also the instinct to turn to me for comfort and protection. So we stood hand in hand like two children, and there was peace in our hearts for all the dark things that surrounded us.
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How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!
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Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.' That's a rather broad idea,' I remarked. One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,' he answered.
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How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!
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‎A change of work is the best rest.
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Anything is better than stagnation.
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She was as good as she was beautiful and as intelligent as she was good.
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Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l'admire.A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him.
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It is a question of cubic capacity, said he; a man with so large a brain must have something in it.
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