Arthur Conan Doyle

See also: Sherlock Holmes

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (May 22 1859 – July 7 1930) was a British writer and physician, most famous as the creator of the character Sherlock Holmes.

Quotes

The highest morality may prove also to be the highest wisdom when the half-told story comes to be finished.
- The Boer War (1902)

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. It is the effect of the joining on the one hand of imagination, and on the other hand of some power of materialization. The imagination, I may say, comes from me — the materializing power from elsewhere.
- Before showing test footage from the movie The Lost World, based upon his novel, as a trick at the annual meeting of the Society of American Magicians in 1922. The New York Times ran a story the next day: DINOSAURS CAVORT IN FILM FOR DOYLE SPIRITIST MYSTIFIES WORLD-FAMED MAGICIANS WITH PICTURES OF PREHISTORIC BEASTS — KEEPS ORIGIN A SECRET — MONSTERS OF OTHER AGES SHOWN, SOME FIGHTING, SOME AT PLAY, IN THEIR NATIVE JUNGLES

When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hopes seem hardly worth having, just mount a bicycle and go for a good spin down the road, without thought of anything but the ride you are taking.
- Dr. A. Conan Doyle (May 1895). "Testimony of an Enthusiast". Demorest’s Family Magazine.

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.
- Quoted in The Life of Faith by Dr. A. T. Schofield, which was quoted in Heresies Exposed by William C. Irvine (Loizeaux Brothers, Neptune, New Jersey, 1921, p. 179)

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.
- (Of cricket) Adventures of Gerard (1903)

You are my heart, my life, my one and only thought.
- The White Company (1891)

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.
- "A British Commando", The Strand Magazine (June 1901), referencing the NRA Headquarters at Bisley, Surrey and Conan-Doyle's desire to develop local rifle clubs more accessible to working class men.

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. Some eighty thousand years are supposed to have existed between paleolithic and neolithic man. Yet in all that time he only learned to grind his flint stones instead of chipping them. But within our father's lives what changes have there not been? The railway and the telegraph, chloroform and applied electricity. 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. Primeval man stumbled along with peering eyes, and slow, uncertain footsteps. Now we walk briskly towards our unknown goal.

When you look closely it is a question whether that which is a wrong to the present community may not prove to have been a right to the interests of posterity. That sounds a little foggy; but I will make my meaning more clear when I say that I think right and wrong are both tools which are being wielded by those great hands which are shaping the destinies of the universe, that both are making for improvement; but that the action of the one is immediate, and that of the other more slow, but none the less certain. Our own distinction of right and wrong is founded too much upon the immediate convenience of the community, and does not inquire sufficiently deeply into the ultimate effect.

I should dearly love that the world should be ever so little better for my presence. Even on this small stage we have our two sides, and something might be done by throwing all one's weight on the scale of breadth, tolerance, charity, temperance, peace, and kindliness to man and beast. We can't all strike very big blows, and even the little ones count for something.

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.

At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society.
- Quoted in Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food (New York: Norton & Company, 2009, ISBN 978-0-393-06595-4), p. 137

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.
- Quoted in The Life of Faith by Dr. A. T. Schofield, which was quoted in Heresies Exposed by William C. Irvine (Loizeaux Brothers, Neptune, New Jersey, 1921, p. 179)

STEEL TRUE
BLADE STRAIGHT
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
KNIGHT
PATRIOT, PHYSICIAN & MAN OF LETTERS

I loved mysteries and read all of Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle.
- Isabel Allende Interview

The most ordinary spiritual void surrounds Jack London's adventures, recalling a similar void which envelops the journalistic feuilleton or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories.
- Osip Mandelstam review of JACK LONDON. COLLECTED WORKS. INTRODUCTION BY LEONID ANDREEV. TRANSLATED BY A. N. KUDRYATSEVA. translated into English in The complete critical prose (1997)