Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection [newly updated] (Book Center)

by Arthur Conan Doyle

No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so.

“What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence,” returned my companion, bitterly. “The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done.

An exception disproves the rule.

I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.

One of our greatest statesmen has said that a change of work is the best rest.

“life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.

The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,”

“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

a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclopaedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment.

it's a wicked world, and when a clever man turns his brains to crime it is the worst of all.

when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

“It would cease to be a danger if we could define it,”

for nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person,

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.

On the whole, he thinks that Barclay's devotion to his wife was greater than his wife's to Barclay. He was acutely uneasy if he were absent from her for a day. She, on the other hand, though devoted and faithful, was less obtrusively affectionate.

There are some trees, Watson, which grow to a certain height and then suddenly develop some unsightly eccentricity.

The person becomes, as it were, the epitome of the history of his own family.”

class—“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 possibly a meretricious, effect.

Even if she couldn't love me it was a great deal to me just to see her dainty form about the house, and to hear the sound of her voice.”

“you call that love, Mr. Carruthers, but I should call it selfishness.”

Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.

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

Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius,

But the quick inference, the subtle trap, the clever forecast of coming events, the triumphant vindication of bold theories—are these not the pride and the justification of our life's work?

“Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last. This is an instructive case. There is neither money nor credit in it, and yet one would wish to tidy it up.

“We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

He disliked and distrusted the sex, but he was always a chivalrous opponent.

Of all ruins, that of a noble mind is the most deplorable.

She is a stray chicken in a world of foxes. When she is gobbled up she is hardly missed.

‘Thrice is he armed who hath his quarrel just.’

“When a man's conscience is easy you can't rattle him.

Such slips are common to all mortals, and the greatest is he who can recognize and repair them.

I have even heard that you go the length of boxing with the young officers. What is the result? Nobody takes you seriously.