Arthur Conan Doyle

Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot.

[ Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson :] The fair sex is your department.

Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!

Like all Holmes’s reasoning the thing seemed simplicity itself when it was once explained.

Then we rushed on into the captain’s cabin . . . and there he lay . . . while the chaplain stood, with a smoking pistol in his hand.

There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.

He [Professor Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.

“Excellent,” I cried. “Elementary,” said he.

I should prefer that you do not mention my name at all in connection with the case, as I choose to be only associated with those crimes which present some difficulty in their solution.

Your conversation is most entertaining. When you go out close the door, for there is a decided draught.

My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.

To Sherlock Holmes she [Irene Adler] is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.

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.

Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labor, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been to China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.

The only unofficial consulting detective. I am the last and highest court of appeal in detection.

It is cocaine . . . a seven per cent solution.

“Wonderful!” I ejaculated.

There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colorless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.

You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.

Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

“How on earth did you know that?”

[ The first encounter between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson :] “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”

The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.

It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.

Of all the ruins that of a noble mind is the most deplorable.

It’s every man’s business to see justice done.

I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.

There comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before.

The chief proof of mans greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.

There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.

And once again Mr. Sherlock Holmes is free to devote his life to examining those interesting little problems which the complexity of human life so pletifuly presents.

The case has, in some respects, been not entirely devoid of interest.

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Skill is fine, and genius is splendid, but the right contacts are more valuable than either.