Arthur Doyle Quotes (32 Quotes)

Nay, said she, the saints in Heaven cannot help me now until they take me to my rest. There is no place for me in the world beyond, and all my friends were slain on the day I was taken. Leave me, brave men, and let me care for myself. Already it lightens in the east, and black will be your fate if you are taken. Go, and may the blessing of one who was once a holy nun go with you and guard you from danger.

Our young friend makes up for many obvious mental lacunae by some measure of primitive common sense, remarked Challenger.

It had darkened since I left, and now I could only see here and there the glistening of moisture upon the black walls, and far away down at the end of the shaft the gleam of the broken water. I shouted but only the same half-human cry of the fall was borne back to my ears.

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.

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.

Here and there a tawny brook prattled out from among the underwood and lost itself again in the ferns and brambles upon the further side. Save the dull piping of insects and the sough of the leaves, there was silence everywhere--the sweet restful silence of nature.

I have learned never to ridicule any man's opinion, however strange it may seem

When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.

I never make exceptions. An exception disproves the rule.

To his pure and knightly soul not Edith alone, but every woman, sat high and aloof, enthroned and exalted, with a thousand mystic excellencies and virtues which raised her far above the rude world of man. There was joy in contact with them and yet there was fear, fear lest his own unworthiness, his untrained tongue or rougher ways should in some way break rudely upon this delicate and tender thing.

The landlady looked at him in a motherly way and shook her head. You have had no great truck with the world, she said, or you would have learned that it is the small men and not the great who hold their noses in the air.

Dr. Munro, sir, said he, I am a walking museum. You could fit what ISN'T the matter with me on to the back of a ---- visiting card. If there's any complaint you want to make a special study of, just you come to me, sir, and see what I can do for you. It's not every one that can say that he has had cholera three times, and cured himself by living on red pepper and brandy.

You know how often the turning down this street or that, the accepting or rejecting of an invitation, may deflect the whole current of our lives into some other channel. Are we mere leaves, fluttered hither and thither by the wind, or are we rather, with every conviction that we are free agents, carried steadily along to a definite and pre-determined end

Come what may, I am bound to think that all things are ordered for the best though when the good is a furlong off, and we with our beetle eyes can only see three inches, it takes some confidence in general principles to pull us through.

Skill is fine, and genius is splendid, but the right contacts are more valuable than either.

Why should people ever take credit for charity when they must know that they cannot gain as much pleasure out of their guineas in any other fashion

A little monograph on the ashes of one hundred and forty different varieties of pipe, cigar, and cigarette tobacco.

I think that I may go so far as to say, Watson, that I have not lived wholly in vain, he remarked. If my record were closed to-night I could still survey it with equanimity. The air of London is the sweeter for my presence.

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes

What did we care, any one of the three of us, where we sat or how we lived, when youth throbbed hot in our veins, and our souls were all aflame with the possibilities of life

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks.

You know my powers, my dear Watson, and yet at the end of three months I was forced to confess that I had at last met an antagonist who was my intellectual equal. My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill.

The Professor snorted like an angry buffalo. You really touch the limit, said he. You enlarge my view of the possible. Cerebral paresis Mental inertia Wonderful

To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell.

Too much Wait till you have lived here longer. Look down the valley See the cloud of a hundred chimneys that overshadows it I tell you that the cloud of murder hangs thicker and lower than that over the heads of the people. It is the Valley of Fear, the Valley of Death. The terror is in the hearts of the people from the dusk to the dawn. Wait, young man, and you will learn for yourself.

It was a September evening, and not yet seven o'clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-colored clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light,--sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all human kind, they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more.

Streams may spring from one source, and yet some be clear and some be foul.

A man loses his fortune he gains earnestness. His eyesight goes it leads him to a spirituality. The girl loses her beauty she becomes more sympathetic. We think we are pushing our own way bravely, but there is a great Hand in ours all the time.

Is it not Is it not Breadth of view, my dear Mr. Mac, is one of the essentials of our profession. The interplay of ideas and the oblique uses of knowledge are often of extraordinary interest.

I carry my own church about under my own hat, said I. Bricks and mortar won't make a staircase to heaven. I believe with your Master that the human heart is the best temple.

I passed close to the pterodactyl swamp, and as I did so, with a dry, crisp, leathery rattle of wings, one of these great creatures--it was twenty feet at least from tip to tip--rose up from somewhere near me and soared into the air. As it passed across the face of the moon the light shone clearly through the membranous wings, and it looked like a flying skeleton against the white, tropical radiance.

Well, I'm a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye.