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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes quotes
16 quotes from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #1661 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.
— Spoken by a character · I. A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA
It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.
— Spoken by a character · I. A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA
“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,” he answered, laughing.
— Spoken by a character · IV. THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.
Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details.
— Spoken by a character · III. A CASE OF IDENTITY
When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals.
— Spoken by a character · VIII. THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND
Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.
— Holmes · VIII. THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND
I am lost without my Boswell.
— Spoken by a character · I. A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA
Well,” he said, “I say now, as I said then, that 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.
— Spoken by a character · V. THE FIVE ORANGE PIPS
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.
— Spoken by a character · III. A CASE OF IDENTITY
Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.
— Holmes · III. A CASE OF IDENTITY
On the contrary, Watson, you can see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you see.
— Spoken by a character · VII. THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLUE CARBUNCLE
“It is quite a three pipe problem, and I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.”
— Spoken by a character · II. THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE
The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime.
Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.
— Spoken by a character · I. A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA
This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.
— Spoken by a character · X. THE ADVENTURE OF THE NOBLE BACHELOR