Quotes from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“Am dining at Goldini's Restaurant, Gloucester Road, Kensington. Please come at once and join me there. Bring with you a jemmy, a dark lantern, a chisel, and a revolver. S. H." It was a nice equipment for a respectable citizen to carry through the dim, fog-draped streets.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“The most serious point in the case is the disposition of the child."
What on earth has that to do with it?" I ejaculated.
My dear Watson, you as a medical man are continually gaining insight as to the tendencies of a child by the study of the parents. Don't you see that the converse is equally valid. I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“Oh how I've missed you, Holmes.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy. It cost one man his reason, it cost me a blood-letting, and it cost yet another man the penalties of the law. Yet there was certainly an element of comedy. Well, you shall judge for yourselves.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built. Life is commonplace; the papers are sterile; audacity and romance seem to have passed forever from the criminal world. Can you ask me, then, whether I am ready to look into any new problem, however trivial it may prove?”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“Holmes laughed. "Watson insists that I am the dramatist in real life," said he. "Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well-staged performance. Surely our profession, Mr. Mac, would be a drab and sordid one if we did not sometimes set the scene so as to glorify our results. The blunt accusation, the brutal tap upon the shoulder - what can one make of such a denouement? 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? At the present moment you thrill with the glamour of the situation and the anticipation of the hunt. Where would be that thrill if I had been as definite as a timetable?”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“I don't take much stock of detectives in novels - chaps that do things and never let you see how they do them. That's just inspiration: not business.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“no era aquel un momento para dimes y diretes.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo. Ipse domi simul ac nummos contemplar in arca.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“«Este hombre tal vez sea muy inteligente, pero, desde luego, es insufriblemente engreído».”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“DÉCOR : Un salon dans la maison des Murray, vieille demeure triste et en mauvais état, dans un lointain quartier de Londres. Cependant, la pièce est vaste et conserve un certain aspect de grandeur. Un escalier au fond de la pièce conduit au premier étage, dont on entrevoit le palier. À droite, une porte donnant dans le vestibule. Une large fenêtre occupe la plus grande partie du côté droit.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“Parece que el saber que uno ha hecho todo lo posible, ayuda a enfrentarse con el peligro. No queda entonces otro recurso que el de esperar con calma el resultado. En”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“el castigo sólo produce placer a quien lo administra si la víctima tiene tiempo de conocer sus principales detalles y la personalidad de su ejecutor.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“pero más vale aprender tarde que no aprender nunca.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“Chaldean roots which are surely to be traced in the Cornish branch of the great Celtic speech.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“-No hay nada tan engañoso como un hecho evidente -respondió”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“I would not tell them too much. Women are never to be entirely trusted,—not the best of them.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

“El conocimiento siempre da más conocimiento, del mismo modo que el dinero da más interés.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol 2

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“If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you'll be at coming up with new ideas. As Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“It was warm and salty, chalky and bittersweet. It tasted like the blood of some old, old thing. I tried not to think about how much at the mercy of these strange people I now was. But in fact my courage was failing. Both Dona Catalina and the guide's mocking eyes had slowly gone cold and mantislike. A wave of insect sound sweeping up the river seemed to splatter the darkness with shards of sharpedged light. I felt my lips go numb. Trying not to appear as loaded as I felt, I crossed to my hammock and lay back. Behind my closed eyelids there was a flowing river of magenta light. It occurred to me in a kind of dream mental pirouette that a helicopter must be landing on top of the hut, and this was the last impression I had. When I regained consciousness I appeared to myself to be surfing on the inner curl of a wave of brightly lit transparent information several hundred feet high. Exhilaration gave way to terror as I realised that my wave was speeding toward a rocky coastline.”
― Terence McKenna, quote from Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

“You hate birthdays yet pee your pants over presents. There is clearly something wrong with you," Garrett joked.”
― quote from A Beautiful Lie

“Perhaps I don't know enough yet to find the right words for it, but I think I can describe it. It happened again just a moment ago. I don't know how to put it except by saying that I see things in two different ways-everything, ideas included. If I make an effort to find any difference in them, each of them is the same today as it was yesterday, but as soon as I shut my eyes they're suddenly transformed, in a different light. Perhaps I went wrong about the imaginary numbers. If I get to them by going straight along inside mathematics, so to speak, they seem quite natural. It's only if I look at them directly, in all their strangeness, that they seem impossible. But of course I may be all wrong about this, I know too little about it. But I wasn't wrong about Basini. I wasn't wrong when I couldn't turn my ear away from the faint trickling sound in the high wall or my eye from the silent, swirling dust going up in the beam of light from a lamp. No, I wasn't wrong when I talked about things having a second, secret life that nobody takes any notice of! I-I don't mean it literally-it's not that things are alive, it's not that Basini seemed to have two faces-it was more as if I had a sort of second sight and saw all this not with the eyes of reason. Just as I can feel an idea coming to life in my mind, in the same way I feel something alive in me when I look at things and stop thinking. There's something dark in me, deep under all my thoughts, something I can't measure out with thoughts, a sort of life that can't be expressed in words and which is my life, all the same.

“That silent life oppressed me, harassed me. Something kept on making me stare at it. I was tormented by the fear that our whole life might be like that and that I was only finding it out here and there, in bits and pieces. . . . Oh, I was dreadfully afraid! I was out of my mind.. .”

These words and these figures of speech, which were far beyond what was appropriate to Törless's age, flowed easily and naturally from his lips in this state of vast excitement he was in, in this moment of almost poetic inspiration. Then he lowered his voice and, as though moved by his own suffering, he added:

“Now it's all over. I know now I was wrong after all. I'm not afraid of anything any more. I know that things are just things and will probably always be so. And I shall probably go on for ever seeing them sometimes this way and sometimes that, sometimes with the eyes of reason, and sometimes with those other eyes. . . . And I shan't ever try again to compare one with the other. .”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless

“It was one of those summers you’re nostalgic for even before it passes. Pale, bled skies. Thunderstorms in the night. Sour-smelling dawns. It brought temptation, and yearning, and ache – these are the summer things.”
― Kevin Barry, quote from City of Bohane

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