Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

You see, but you do not observe.

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.

It is quite a three-pipe problem, and I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.

The case has, in some respects, been not entirely devoid of interest.

Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.

You know my method. It is founded upon the observance of trifles.

Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.

The bow was made in England, Of true wood, of yew wood, The wood of English bows.

‘It is the unofficial force—the Baker Street irregulars.’ As he spoke, there came a swift pattering of naked feet upon the stairs, a clatter of high voices, and in rushed a dozen dirty and ragged little street Arabs.

You know my methods. Apply them.

I never make exceptions. An exception disproves the rule.

The most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance money.

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.

It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has all the evidence. It biases the judgement.