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Analysis, to Analyze
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My mind 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. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Appearance
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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.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Assumptions
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I never guess. It is a shocking habit -- destructive to the logical faculty.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Business
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A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Control
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There is nothing more unaesthetic than a policeman.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Crime
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Just see how it glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime. Every good stone is. They are the devil
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1891
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Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult is it to bring it home.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Doctors
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When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Education
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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.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Evil
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Where there is no imagination there is no horror.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Facts
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There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them.
-Sir 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. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. 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. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
You appear to be astonished, he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.
To forget it!
You see, he explained, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.
But the Solar System! I protested.
What the deuce is it to me? he interrupted impatiently: you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.
This is Watson describing one of his earliest conversations with Sherlock Holmeshttp://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DoyScar.html
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, November, 1887
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Laziness
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I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Learning
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All other men are specialists, but his specialty is omniscience.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Libraries
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A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Life
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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 merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Logic
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From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Mistakes
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It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Potential
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When the impossibility has been eliminated, whatever remains, no matter how improbable... is possible.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Reading
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You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Science
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Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Talent
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Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Things, Little Things
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It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Books by and about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle