Quotes to inspire and reflect

I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.

Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.

He needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature: he looked inwards, and found her there.

’Tis sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that here is God’s plenty.

The famous rules, which the French call Des Trots Onitez, or, the Three Unities, which ought to be observed in every regular play; namely, of Time, Place, and Action.

Arms, and the man I sing.

Can draw you to her with a single hair.

She knows her man, and when you rant and swear,

Not Heaven itself upon the past has power;

But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Wit will shine

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

There is a pleasure sure,

The trumpet shall be heard on high,

The soft complaining flute.

From harmony, from heavenly harmony

For secrets are edged tools,

The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,

All human things are subject to decay,

Fairest Isle, all isles excelling.

And love’s the noblest frailty of the mind.

War is the trade of kings.

I am as free as nature first made man,

The wise, for cure, on exercise depend;

Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;

Revenge, revenge! Timotheus cries.

Beware the fury of a patient man.

Nor is the people’s judgement always true:

A man so various that he seemed to be

But far more numerous was the herd of such

Great wits are sure to madness near allied.

In friendship false, implacable in hate:

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement.

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

It is the unofficial force—the Baker Street irregulars.

You know my methods. Apply them.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

What one man can invent another can discover.

‘That was the curious incident,’ remarked Sherlock Holmes.

‘The dog did nothing in the night-time.’

‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.’

‘Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’

‘Excellent,’ I cried. ‘Elementary,’ said he. often misquoted as, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’, a remark attributed to Sherlock Holmes, but not found in this form in any book by Arthur Conan Doyle, first found in P.G. Wodehouse Psmith Journalist (1915)

Ex-Professor Moriarty of mathematical celebrity … is the Napoleon of crime, Watson.

The giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared.

Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age.