“Of all ruins, that of a noble mind is the most deplorable.- The Adventure of the Dying Detective”

“The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.”

“A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.”

“To be alone is the fate of all great minds—a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.”

“Most of this world's misery is the fruit not as priests tell us of wickedness, but of stupidity....And we know that of all stupidities he considered anger the most deplorable.”

“Curiosity, that is, the separate drive to explore the world disinterestedly, without being stimulated by danger or physiological dissatisfaction, is, according to students of evolution, rooted in specific morphological characteristics of our species and thus cannot be eliminated from our minds as long as our species retains its identity. As both Pandora’s most deplorable accident and the adventures of our progenitors in Paradise testify, curiosity has been a main cause of all the calamities and misfortunes that have befallen mankind, and it has unquestionably been the source of all its achievements.”