Quotes to inspire and reflect

How many deaths will it take till he knows

Our excessive tolerance with regard to suicide is due to the fact that, since the state of mind from which it springs is a general one, we cannot condemn it without condemning ourselves; we are too saturated with it not partly to excuse it.

Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima. Rien .

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

I am about to scream madly in the office,

Sundered by peaks unscalable,

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

The nation is ruined, but mountains and rivers remain.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

“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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

[ 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.

You have seen how a man was made a slave;

We have all come out of Gogol’s Overcoat .

Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?

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