Arthur Conan Doyle

“I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.”

“No mention of that local hunt, Watson," said Holmes with a mischievous smile, "but a country doctor, as you very astutely observed.”

“I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth. Not that you are entirely wrong in this instance”

“He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by his indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to think that I had so far mastered his system as to apply it in a way which earned his approval.”

“Really, Watson, you excel yourself," said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. "I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.”

“He burst into one of his rare fits of laughter as he turned away from the picture. I have not heard him laugh often, and it has always boded ill to somebody.”

“There's a light in a woman's eyes that speaks louder than words.”

“There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you.”

“It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

“Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”

“Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools.”

“...while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.”

“The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one’s soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but on the other hand you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples. As you look at their grey stone huts against the scarred hillsides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door, fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that the presence there was more natural than your own. The strange thing is that they should have lived so thickly on what must always have been most unfruitful soil. I am no antiquarian, but I could imagine that they were some unwarlike and harried race who were forced to accept that which none other would occupy.”

“To underestimate oneself is as much an exaggeration of one's powers than the other.”

“You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?""For me," said Sherlock Holmes, "there still remains the cocaine bottle.”

“A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen.”

“What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently: "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.”

“By the way, Doctor, I shall want your cooperation.''I shall be delighted.''You don't mind breaking the law?''Not in the least.''Nor running a chance of arrest?''Not in a good cause.''Oh, the cause is excellent!''Then I am your man.''I was sure that I might rely on you.”

“I get in the dumps at times, and don't open my mouth for days on end. You must not think I am sulky when I do that. Just let me alone, and I'll soon be right.”

“WATSON: Then you are yourself inclining to the supernatural explanation.     HOLMES: if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct, and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.”

“When a man does a queer thing, or two queer things, there may be a meaning to it, but when everything he does is queer, then you begin to wonder”

“It was easier to know it than to explain why I know it. If you were asked to prove that two and two made four, you might find some difficulty, and yet you are quite sure of the fact.~ Sherlock Holmes”

“I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Homes, in one of his queer humours, would sit in an armchair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.”

“I am afraid that I rather give myself away when I explain," said he. "Results without causes are much more impressive.”

“Are they not fresh and beautiful?" [Watson] cried...Holmes shook his head gravely."... You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed bu their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed here... They always filled me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson... that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beauty of the countryside... But the reason is obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish.”

“There are women in whom the love of a lover extinguishes all other loves, and I think that she must have been one.”

“This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.”

“Watson, you can see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you see.”

“Well," he said, "I say, now, as I said then, that a man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of this library, where he can get it if he wants it.”

“Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.”

“We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence.”

“A fine thought in fine language is a most precious jewel, and should not be hid away, but be exposed for use and ornament.”

“How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise.”

“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”

“I must apologize for calling so late," said he, "and I must further beg you to be so unconventional as to allow me to leave your house presently by scrambling over your back garden wall.”

“It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high and allow you to look down upon the houses like this."I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself."Look at those big, isolated clumps of buildings rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea.""The board-schools.""Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.”

“Sherlock Holmes closed his eyes and placed his elbows upon the arms of his chair, with his finger-tips together. “The ideal reasoner,” he remarked, “would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. We have not yet grasped the results which the reason alone can attain to. Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to utilise all the facts which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclopaedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment. It is not so impossible, however, that a man should possess all knowledge which is likely to be useful to him in his work, and this I have endeavoured in my case to do.”

“A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.”

“All right, Watson. Don’t look so scared,” he muttered in a very weak voice. “It’s not as bad as it seems.”“Thank God for that!”“I’m a bit of a single-stick expert, as you know. I took most of them on my guard. It was the second man that was too much for me.”“What can I do, Holmes? Of course, it was that damned fellow who set them on. I’ll go and thrash the hide off him if you give the word.”“Good old Watson!(...)”

“(...) We are bound to go.”My answer was to rise from the table.“You are right, Holmes. We are bound to go.”He sprang up and shook me by the hand.“I knew you would not shrink at the last,” said he, and for a moment I saw something in his eyes which was nearer to tenderness than I had ever seen. The next instant he was his masterful, practical self once more.”

“(...)There’s the cab, Hopkins, and you can remove your man. If you want me for the trial, my address and that of Watson will be somewhere in Norway –I’ll send particulars later.”

“Draw your chair up, and hand me my violin, for the only problem which we have still to solve is how to while away these bleak autumnal evenings.”

“It is introspective, and I want to introspect.”

“Shall the world, then, be overrun by oysters?”

“...Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.”

“He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer- excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained observer to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his.”

“Over the green squares of the fields and the low curves of a wood there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance like some fantastic landscape in a dream. Baskerville sat for a long time, his gaze fixed upon it, and I read upon his eager face how much it meant to him, this first sight of that strange spot where the men of his blood had held sway so long and left their mark so deep.”

“To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the countryside, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year, Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed, The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation--sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles.”

“‎A change of work is the best rest.”

“The chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.”