Life & Wisdom Quote by Arthur Conan Doyle

A clean little dagger of a sentence: praise on the surface, indictment in the balance. Conan Doyle pairs “ignorance” and “knowledge” as if they’re twins, then gives them the same flattering adjective - “remarkable” - to make the contrast sting. The line works because it refuses the comforting idea that knowledge naturally crowds out blind spots. Instead it suggests something sharper: ignorance can be curated, even strategic, and in certain people it becomes as distinctive a feature as expertise.

In Doyle’s world, that tension sits comfortably inside the Sherlock Holmes ethos. Holmes is famously brilliant and famously uninterested in what he deems irrelevant; he can reconstruct a stranger’s life from a cufflink, yet shrug at basic civic facts. Calling that ignorance “remarkable” isn’t just a joke about eccentricity. It’s a critique of a modern type: the specialist who treats the rest of human experience as background noise, then mistakes that narrowing for rigor. The sentence flatters the intellect while quietly asking what it costs to live inside a self-designed syllabus.

There’s also a Victorian-era subtext about authority. Knowledge carried social power, but so did the performance of knowing what mattered. By making ignorance “remarkable,” Doyle hints at a classed or professional arrogance: the confidence to dismiss whole domains, to be loudly uninterested, to let gaps signal superiority rather than deficiency.

It lands because it’s balanced, economical, and morally itchy. You’re left admiring the mind and distrusting the person.