100 Detective Work Quotes

Following is our list of detective work quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about detective stories.

Famous Detective Work Quotes

I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge. — Immanuel Kant

Become a creative thinking detective! Ask probing questions. There is no such thing as a wasted question. — Elaine Dundon

Investigation may be likened to the long months of pregnancy, and solving a problem to the day of birth. To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it. — Mao Zedong

Nothing matters but the facts. Without them, the science of criminal investigation is nothing more than a guessing game. — Blake Edwards

Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. — Arthur Conan Doyle

It all comes down to probable cause: If you think something's up, maybe you gotta take a look. — Ron Livingston

It is the brain, the little gray cells on which one must rely. One must seek the truth within--not without." ~ Poirot — Agatha Christie

The job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer. — Sayings

You can't solve a problem? Well, get down and investigate the present facts and [the problem's] past history! When you have investigated the problem thoroughly, you will know how to solve it. — Mao Zedong

Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind. — Marston Bates

Without subtle ingenuity of mind, one cannot make certain of the truth of their reports. — Sun Tzu

Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions. — Agatha Christie

I dove on those papers like Sherlock Holmes on a cappuccino binge. — Jordan Sonnenblick

MOST LIES succeed because no one goes through the work to figure out how to catch them. — Paul Ekman

Mystery is an intellectual process... But suspense is essentially an emotional process. — Alfred Hitchcock

Short Detective Work Quotes

• Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain. — Carl Jung
• If you judge, investigate. — Seneca The Elder
• My role and my obligation was to conduct criminal investigations. — Louis J. Freeh
• I'm sort of fascinated by the whole espionage crime thing. — Aaron Eckhart
• It is by doubting that we come to investigate, and by investigating that we recognize the truth. — Peter Abelard
• If you are curious, you'll find the puzzles around you. If you are determined, you will solve them. — Erno Rubik
• It's hard to detect good luck - it looks so much like something you've earned. — Frank A. Clark
• Putting the pieces of the puzzle together with each other is going to get us to the truth faster. — Cathie Wood
• Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin. — Ivan Pavlov
• Every piece of the puzzle that doesn't fit gets you closer to the answer. — Cynthia Lewis

Detective Quotes

Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well. — Frantz Fanon

I can smell bullshit from a mile away but it's so much harder to detect when it's around you all day. — Dane Cook

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story. — Agatha Christie

Breast cancer deaths in America have been declining for more than a decade. Much of that success is due to early detection and better treatments for women. I strongly encourage women to get a mammogram. — Larry Craig

History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done. — Sydney J. Harris

In 'whichever direction' you may turn your gaze you will find One Eternal Indivisible Being manifested. Yet, it is not at all easy to detect this Presence, because He interpenetrates everything. — Anandamayi Ma

Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid — Raymond Chandler

If the origin of life is the origin of evolution & nothing comes before life then we are indeed stuck. I don’t think we need to be. Let’s shed the dogma, ego, & closed minds & ask the question clearly. How do we detect the onset of evolution BEFORE biology? — Lee Cronin

My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky. — Alan Moore

The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect. — Mark Twain

Detective Stories Quotes

We're living in an upside-down era. Regulators detect danger only when a critical mass of citizens has become alarmed. Newsrooms report stories only when the embarrassment of not reporting them becomes unbearable. Universities teach lessons screened by students. It won't end well. — Bret Weinstein

Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid. — Arthur Conan Doyle

I made the key discovery for CRISPR there, while living in my scientific monastery in northern Sweden. At the same time, I was very interested in detective stories, searching for enigmas. — Emmanuelle Charpentier

It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check. — Erle Stanley Gardner

Listen, darling, tomorrow I'll buy you a whole lot of detective stories, but don't worry your pretty little head over mysteries tonight. — Dashiell Hammett

American violence is public life, it's a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form. — Chester Himes

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order. — P. D. James

Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories. — Jeffery Deaver

Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath they feed a hunger for justice ... you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living. — Dorothy L. Sayers

The Compleat Angler is acknowledged to be one of the world's books. Only the trouble is that the world doesn't read its books, it borrows a detective story instead. — Stephen Leacock

Detective Fiction Quotes

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of. — Dashiell Hammett

The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective. — Raymond Chandler

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. — Arthur C. Clarke

There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. — S. S. Van Dine

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again. — Joseph Wambaugh

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. — Raymond Chandler

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries. Not their solution. — John Fowles

One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. — Arthur C. Clarke

People Writing About Detective Work

Name	Quotes	Likes
Mao Zedong quotes on youth, war and education	272	2979
Agatha Christie quotes on writing, love and death	376	2192
Immanuel Kant quotes on love, ethics and god	314	8208
Blake Edwards	9	81
Arthur Conan Doyle quotes on sherlock holmes, love and life	414	3321
Ron Livingston quotes on coffee, leadership and politics	28	281

More Detective Work Quotes

I know when I was here prosecuting homicides in the District of Columbia, one of the most effective units here was the cold case squad, which had on it FBI agents, as well as Metropolitan Police Department homicide detectives working together. — Robert Mueller

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected. — Henry David Thoreau

They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," he remarked with a smile. "It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Anything is easy to the man who sees.... The open eye of the open mind--that has more to do with real detective work than all the deduction and induction and analysis ever devised. — Samuel Hopkins Adams

Technology is not a panacea. I refuse to work on technology to track users, analyze usage patterns, watermark information, censor, detect drug use, or eavesdrop. I am not naive enough to think any of those technologies could enable a 'compromise'. — Bram Cohen

You just work really hard and scrutinize. What is it called in politics? "Opposition research"? You want to do the detective work on your client so to speak before your opponent can dig it up. We're vetting everything thoroughly. — James Ponsoldt

When I'm working on a serious and solid book ... I read about a detective novel a day. It's the best legal dope in the world. It makes you feel good until the next morning you can work again. — Mary Lee Settle

Since 2001, the Patriot Act has provided the means to detect and disrupt terrorist threats against the U.S. Prior to enactment of the law, major legal barriers prevented intelligence, national defense, and law enforcement agencies from working together and sharing information. — Roger Wicker

For a detective or street police, the only real satisfaction is the work itself; when a cop spends more and more time getting aggravated with the details, he's finished. The attitude of co-workers, the indifference of superiors, the poor quality of the equipment - all of it pales if you still love the job; all of it matters if you don't. — David Simon

Chuckling to herself, Nancy said aloud, "Romance and detective work won't mix tonight! — Carolyn Keene

So, I got into the law enforcement game. I worked for an outfit called Newton Detective Agency for a while. I worked eight hours on the waterfront making sure the longshoremen didn't take too many things. — Clint Walker

The best crime novels are not about how a detective works on a case; they are about how a case works on a detective. — Michael Connelly

Health experts working on a union backed screening program to detect bladder cancer in a Georgia chemical plant were stunned when the local (ACS) cancer society not only didn't support the program, but tried to discourage participation in it. — Jack Anderson

The best introduction by far to representation of the human figure in art. The Nude is a beautifully written work of sophisticated connoisseurship that analyzes art in its own terms rather than imposing strident, politicized categories on it. It outlines the major body types, male and female, in Western art and, via a wealth of illustrations, trains the reader's eye to detect and evaluate proportion. This book reveres art — Camille Anna Paglia

Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work. — Joseph Conrad

For a long time, we've worked on detecting planets with whatever was at hand, making use of existing small telescopes or even amateur telescopes. It's time to move on to the next stage. — Andrew Gould

It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn't even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in. — Christopher Hitchens

In the police force, two, three, five traitors are detected who are really working for someone else. When we cleanse the police of them, the problem will be simplified a lot. Terrorists will have no one to contact - they will be left without informers. — Akhmad Kadyrov

Sometimes I work purely 8-12 shifts, banging stuff into the computer. Other times, my office is like a scene from a detective movie, with Post-it Notes, plans, photographs all stuck on the walls and arrows going everywhere, and it's 4 A.M. — Irvine Welsh

I used to work as a private detective years and years ago. And my boss gave me this one very simple piece of advice about trying to figure out who to interview first in any investigation. His recommendation: Always pick the people who were fired. Pick the people who are pissed off. — Errol Morris

We wanted to make Tucker's Witch just more human and playful, because I don't think we see enough playfulness between characters on TV. It's like, "Who really gives a damn about two detectives on a case?" The sillier we went, the better it worked. — Tim Matheson

I don't know why one author writes westerns while another writes detective novels. You don't know why. You go where the intensity is. I feel most comfortable writing about monsters. It's possible that I feel like a monster myself. Or maybe it's because we all have a monster inside of us, a vampire, a ghost, a witch or a werewolf. You do it because it works and it feels really right and authentic. — Anne Rice

It was the first time I worked with Matthew McConaughey [in the True Detective].They're fun guys [with Woody Harrelson]. They don't take life at all too seriously, but yet they take their work very seriously. And both of them are just so committed to character and the story. — Michelle Monaghan

It was very fortuitous that the show [True Detective] actually spans seventeen years - so as I was getting older on the show, I was gaining weight. When I'm playing fifty, I'm ten pounds heavier! I don't know if they thought maybe I was method? But it actually worked to my benefit. — Michelle Monaghan

Please help keep the world clean: others may wish to use it. Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence. The only place success comes before work is a dictionary Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. — Arthur C. Clarke

The longer I live, the longer I realize that batting is more a mental matter than it is physical. The ability to grasp the bat, swing at the proper time, take a proper stance; all these are elemental. Batting is rather a study in psychology, a sizing up of a pitcher and catcher and observing little details that are of immense importance. It's like the study of crime, the work of a detective as he picks up clues. — Ty Cobb

I work to create systems that can accurately detect pandemics early, determine their likely importance, and, with any luck, crush those that have the potential to devastate us. — Nathan Wolfe

In the summer of 2010, I was working on a version of "True Detective" that I was thinking might be my next novel, and it was told in these two first-person voices; Cohle and Hart's voices. — Nic Pizzolatto

Most bloggers have no institutional credibility, and so they must build it, by linking transparently, and allowing you to easily double check their work. But more than anything, because linking sources is such an easy thing to do, and the motivations for avoiding links are so dubious, I've detected myself using a new rule of thumb: if you don't link to primary sources, I just don't trust you. — Ben Goldacre

We have made some great strides in terms of treating various types of cancer with early detection. The success rate of recovery for many people today is better than it was a decade or two ago so we can't give up. Yes, we would all love a quick "cure all" but that is not reality. Until then, we all are in this together and we have to keep working towards more progress! — Eva LaRue

I once started a detective story to make money—but I couldn't get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse! — Mary McCarthy

We know well that mistakes are more easily detected in the works of others than in one's own. — Leonardo da Vinci

The best introduction by far to representation of the human figure in art. The Nude is a beautifully written work of sophisticated connoisseurship that analyzes art in its own terms rather than imposing strident, politicized categories on it. It outlines the major body types, male and female, in Western art and, via a wealth of illustrations, trains the reader's eye to detect and evaluate proportion. This book reveres art — Camille Paglia

Filmmaking is all about what we like to do on-screen. We have attempted that in the film. I have worked very hard to perform the character. — Sushant Singh Rajput

During my 30 years on Wall Street, taxes on “unearned income” have bounced up and down with regularity, and I’ve never detected any change in the appetite for hard work and accumulating wealth on the part of myself or any of my fellow capitalists. — Steven Rattner

I love that moment in writing when language falls short. There is something more there. A larger body. Even by the failure of words I begin to detect its dimensions. As I work the prose, shift the verbs, look for new adjectives, a different rhythm, syntax, something new begins to come to the surface. — Susan Griffin

The detective story itself is in a dilemma. It is a vein which is in danger of being worked out, the demand is constant, the powers of supply variable, and the reader, with each one he absorbs, grows a little more sophisticated and harder to please, while the novelist, after each one he writes, becomes a little more exhausted. — Cyril Connolly

Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art. — W. H. Auden

A good test case is a test case that has a high probability of detecting an undiscovered error, not a test case that show that the program works correctly. — Glenford Myers

I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions. — Warren Buffett

Surveys show that more than 50 percent of people in the U.S. have prayed the sinner's prayer and think they're going to heaven because of it even though there is no detectable difference in their lifestyles from those outside of the church. On this issue- the most important issue on earth- we have to be absolutely clear. We need to preach salvation by repentance before God and faith in the finished work of Christ. — J. D. Greear

Your novels show only the tiniest fraction of detective work, the brilliant crime, the tantalizing clues, the dramatic chase, the final battle atop a lofty peak with ocean waves crashing down below, and then… justice served! If they wrote about the real world, four-fifths of the story would consist of the hero sitting in a library for months and following false leads. — Stefan Petrucha

With the early prototypes, I held the phone to my ear and my ear [would] dial the number. You have to detect all sorts of ear-shapes and chin shapes, skin colour and hairdo... that was one of just many examples where we really thought, perhaps this isn’t going to work. — Jonathan Ive

In Conclusion

Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of detective work quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about detective work to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.

Citation

Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of detective work quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.

Embed HTML Link

Copy and paste this HTML code in your webpage

COPY