Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

"Ah, me! it's a wicked world, and when a clever man turns his brains to crime it is the worst of all." ~ The Adventure of the Speckled Band by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact." ~ The Boscombe Valley Mystery by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing," answered Holmes thoughtfully. "It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different." ~ The Boscombe Valley Mystery by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home." ~ The Boscombe Valley Mystery by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools." ~ The Adventure of the Copper Beeches by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "To the man who loves art for its own sake," remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily Telegraph, "it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived." ~ The Adventure of the Copper Beeches by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which set an edge to a man's energy. ~ The Adventure of the Copper Beeches by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction!" ~ The Adventure of the Copper Beeches by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "Crime is common. Logic is rare." ~ The Adventure of the Copper Beeches by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard's blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbors, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser." ~ The Adventure of the Copper Beeches by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle