Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork - reading, writing, thinking - can.

Much has been written about the life of the mind.

There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.

How ghastly for her, people actually thinking, with their brains, and right next door. Oh, the travesty of it all.

When you read, you think, and when you smoke, you think. It's a pleasurable thing, and not a duty.

You have to do something when you're lying in bed. So you play with your mind.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.

A thought is an idea in transit.

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

To me, thoughts are fun and art is fun. The strength of our society should not be idle entertainments but the joy of pursuing ideas.

I get bored quite easily, so I like to keep my mind entertained by challenging myself.

The only recreation there allowed, however, is that of the mind, and of this there is but little.

To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.

I have so many ideas while I'm driving.

People think I watch TV too much, but they are wrong. There is a huge difference between merely "watching" TV and learning to respond aggressively to it. The difference, for most people, is the difference between the living and dying of their own brains.

Keep up the fires of thought, and all will go well.

I'm always trying to tackle subjects that tax me and make me think. That's the key to staying young at heart. The brain has to be exercised the same as the rest of the body.

It's true that you might be socially isolated because you're reading in the library, at home and so on, but you're intensely alive. In fact you're much more alive than these folk walking the streets of New York in crowds, with no intellectual interrogation and questioning going at all.

I cannot live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the duncoloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material?

Doing is very good, but that comes from thinking. Little manifestations of energy through the muscles are called work. But where there is no thought, there will be no work. Fill the brain, therefore, with high thoughts, highest ideals, place them day and night before you, and out of that will come great work.

The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics).

Masturbation is the thinking man's television.

I'd like the [Cosmos] series to be so visually stimulating that somebody who isn't even interested in the concepts will just watch for the effects. And I'd like people who are prepared to do some thinking to be really stimulated.

-Why does a man live? -In order to think about it.

Those who cannot think, have, in my opinion, a necessity (which goes very far towards creating a right) for amusement.