1. “Achievement brings its own anticlimax.”
2. "A court verdict is not always the ending."
3. ”An archeologist is the best husband any woman can have: the older she gets, the more interested he is in her.”
4. "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."
5. “Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them.”
6. “Every murderer is probably someone's old friend.”
7. “Evil is not something superhuman, it's something less than human.”
8. "Good to get away from home sometimes. It gives you new ideas, and new things to think about."
9. “Hastings: "Poirot, I have been thinking." Poirot: "An admirable exercise, my friend. Continue it."”
10. ”I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.”
11. “If I was born once again, I would like to be a woman - always!”
12. “If one chooses to look back over the yourney that has been one's life, is one entitled to ignore those memories that one dislikes? Or is that cowardice? I think, perhaps, one should take one brief look, and say: "Yes, this is a part of my life, but it's done with. It is a strand in the tapesary of my existence. I must recognise it because it is part of me. But there is no need to dwell upon it.”
13. "If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles, one would hardly see anybody."
14. "If the gray cells are not exercised, they grow the rust."
15. “I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly find - at the age of fifty, say - that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about...It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.”
16. “I have learnt that I am me, that I can do the things that, as one might put it, me can do, but I cannot do the things that me would like to do.”
17. ”I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
18. "I learned (what I suppose I really knew already) that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back--that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really an one way street, isn't it?"
19. “I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
20. “I live now on borrowed time, waiting in the anteroom for the summons that will inevitably come. And then - I go on to the next thing, whatever it is. One doesn't luckily have to bother about that.”
21. "I'm an old woman. Nothing makes sense anymore."
22. “In all the world there is nothing so curious and so interesting and so beautiful as truth.
23. "In the midst of death we are in life, Hastings...Murder, I have often noticed, is a great matchmaker."
24. "Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out."
25. “It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.”
26. "Murder, I have often noticed, is a great matchmaker."
27. "My success, let me tell you, has been founded on the psychology--the eternal why of human behavior."
28. "No one," said Hercule Poirot, "is as clever as they think they are."
29. "One of the most frightening words there is...Love."
30. "Some of us, mon cher, see beauty in curious places."
31. “Sometimes been wildly, dispairingly, acutely misarable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just being alive is a grand thing.”
32. "The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes."
33. “The employment of the little gray cells is a mental pleasure. They and they only can be trusted to lead one through fog to the truth..."
34. ”The first sight of him did something to her, twisted her heart round so that it almost hurt. Absurd that a man--an ordinary, yes, a perfectly ordinary young man-- should be able to do that to one! That the mere look of him should set the world spinning, that his voice should make you want--just a little—to cry ... love surely should be a pleasurable emotion, not one that hurts you with its intensity.”
35. "The murder is the end. The story beings long before that --years before, sometimes-- with all the causes and events that bring certain peple to a certain place at a certain time on a certain a certain day. All converging towards a given spot...and then, the time comes --over the top! Zero hour."
36. "The people who do us most harm are the people who shield us from reality."
37. "There is nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation! A human being, Hastings, cannot resist the opportunity to reveal himself and express his personality which conversation gives him. Every time he will give himself away."
38. “The saddest thing in life and the hardest to live through, is the knowledge that there is someone you love very much whom you cannot save from suffering.”
39. "Things don't happen unless you make them! You call me a nitwit sometimes --but in my own way I'm quite clever. I make things happen. Sometimes I have to paln a long way beforehand."
40. "To care passionately for another human creature brings always more sorrow than joy, but one would not be without that experience."
41. “Trains are wonderful.... To travel by train is to see nature and human beings, towns and churches and rivers, in fact, to see life.”
42. "What it comes to in the end is that everybody, perhaps, is capable of murder."
43. “With method and logic one can accomplish anything.”
