Quotes to inspire and reflect

The nation is ruined, but mountains and rivers remain.

I am about to scream madly in the office,

Besides, on general principles it is best that I should not leave the country. Scotland Yard feels lonely without me, and it causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes.

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forced by fate,

I play the game for the game’s own sake.

It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.

You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth to which the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day.

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

Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

“Wonderful!” I ejaculated.

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.

“How on earth did you know that?”

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.

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

Poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America. . . . We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there’s a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.

Billie Holiday’s burned voice

In all the relations of life and death, we are met by the color line.

The story of our inferiority is an old dodge, as I have said; for wherever men oppress their fellows, wherever they enslave them, they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved.

The relation subsisting between the white and colored people of this country is the great, paramount, imperative, and all-commanding question for this age and nation to solve.

The destiny of the colored American . . . is the destiny of America.

The man who is right is a majority. He who has God and conscience on his side, has a majority against the universe. Though he does not represent the present state, he represents the future state. If he does not represent what we are, he represents what we ought to be.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham.

[ On the proposal to send American blacks to colonize Liberia :] Our minds are made up to live here if we can, or die here if we must; so every attempt to remove us will be, as it ought to be, labor lost. Here we are, and here we shall remain.

No, I make no pretension to patriotism. So long as my voice can be heard on this or the other side of the Atlantic, I will hold up America to the lightning scorn of moral indignation. In doing this, I shall feel myself discharging the duty of a true patriot; for he is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.

You have seen how a man was made a slave;

We have all come out of Gogol’s Overcoat .

They have their Hamlets, but we still have our Karamazovs!

We have corrected Thy work and have founded it upon miracle, mystery , and authority . And men rejoiced that they were again led like sheep, and that the terrible gift that brought them such suffering, was, at last, lifted from their hearts.

Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?

I agree that two times two is four is an excellent thing; but if we’re going to start praising everything, then two times two is five is sometimes also a most charming little thing.

The world will be saved by beauty.

If poisonous minerals, and if that tree,

[ Letter to his wife, after being dismissed from the service of his father-in-law :] John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done.