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Keep your revolver near you night and day, and never relax your precautions.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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It is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though perhaps a meretricious, effect.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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Data!data!data!" he cried impatiently. "I can't make bricks without clay.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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Come, Watson, come!" he cried. The game is afoot.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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I had ... come to an entirely erroneous conclusion, which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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You mentioned your name as if I should recognize it, but beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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You would not call me a marrying man, Watson?" "No, indeed!" "You'll be interested to hear that I'm engaged." "My dear fellow! I congrat-" "To Milverton's housemaid." "My dear Holmes!" "I wanted information, Watson.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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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.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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Well, I'm a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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His neighbor is a tooth-drawer. That bag at his girdle is full of the teeth that he drew at Winchester fair. I warrant that there are more sound ones than sorry, for he is quick at his work and a trifle dim in the eye.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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A fine thought in fine language is a most precious jewel, and should not be hid away, but be exposed for use and ornament.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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Jealousy is a strange transformer of characters.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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I think you want a little unofficial help. Three undetected murders in one year won't do, Lestrade. But you handled the Molesey Mystery with less than your usual - that's to say, you handled it fairly well.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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You yourself may not be luminous, but you are a conductor of light.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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His sanguine spirit turns every firefly into a star.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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The good Watson had at that time deserted me for a wife, the only selfish action I can recall in our association. I was alone.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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"Recognising, as I do, that you are the second highest expert in Europe" "Indeed, sir! May I inquire who has the honour to be the first?" Asked Holmes, with some asperity. "To the man of precised, scientific mind the work of Monsieur Bertillon must always appeal strongly." "Then had you not better consult him?" "I said, sir, to the precisely scientific mind. But as a practical man of affairs it is acknowledged that you stand alone. I trust, sir, that I have not inadvertently--" "Just a little," said Holmes.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?' To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.' The dog did nothing in the night-time.' That was the curious incident,' remarked Sherlock Holmes.
Arthur Conan Doyle
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Ah! my dear Watson, there we come into those realms of conjecture, where the most logical mind may be at fault.
Arthur Conan Doyle
