“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.”

“A man always finds it hard to realize that he may have finally lost a woman's love, however badly he may have treated her.”

“To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”

“I have wrought my simple planIf I give one hour of joyTo the boy who’s half a man,Or the man who’s half a boy.”

“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.”

“I said that he was my superior in observation and deduction. If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from an armchair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived. But he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right.”

“I am lost without my Boswell.[Sherlock Holmes on Dr. Watson.]”