25 quotes
It remains one human episode amid all the atrocities which have stained the memory of the war.
The highest morality may prove also to be the highest wisdom when the half-told story comes to be finished.
The Boer War (1902)
One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.
A Study in Scarlet (1887)
London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
You are my heart, my life, my one and only thought.
The White Company (1891)
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.
"I am glad of all details," remarked my friend, "whether they seem to you to be relevant or not".
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
The whole doctrine of original sin, the Fall, the vicarious atonement, the placation of the Almighty by blood—all this is abhorrent to me. The spirit-guides do not insist upon these aspects of religion.
They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1904)
To the man who loves art for its own sake...it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.
I can tell you that it is no game for children, and I will confess that, in spite of my nine campaigns, I felt myself turn pale when the first ball flashed past me.
These pictures are not occult, but they are psychic because everything that emanates from the human spirit or human brain is psychic. It is not supernatural; nothing is. It is preternatural in the sense that it is not known to our ordinary senses.
Now we walk briskly towards our unknown goal.
The Stark Munro Letters (1894)
Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy—deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel—snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails.
The White Company (1891)
Ten years now go further than a thousand then, not so much on account of our finer intellects as because the light we have shows us the way to more.
The Stark Munro Letters (1894)
The more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawning of time.
The Stark Munro Letters (1894)
What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts.
The Stark Munro Letters (1894)
What I hope is that, when the whole district is full of these little rifle clubs, we may then get a central range to which they could all adjourn. Bisley is very useful to men of means, but to the ordinary civilian rifleman it might as well be in the moon. We must have local ranges if the men are really to get the good of them.