Quotes from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“Everything I have to say has already crossed your mind."
"Then possibly my answer has crossed yours.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“I never can resist a touch of the dramatic.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city, He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Homes, in one of his queer humours, would sit in an armchair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“To underestimate oneself is as much an exaggeration of one's powers than the other.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“It’s every man’s business to see justice done.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“In my inmost heart I believed that I could succeed where others failed, and now I had the opportunity to test myself.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“If you are clever enough to bring destruction upon me, rest assured that I shall do as much to you.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“Watson," said he, "if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little over-confident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper 'Norbury' in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“I follow my own methods, and tell as much or as little as I choose. That is the advantage of being unofficial.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“...to underestimate one’s self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s own powers.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old lovers are the worst.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from flowers.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“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.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“Save for the occasional use of cocaine he had no vices, and he only turned to the drug as a protest against the monotony of existence when cases were scanty and the papers uninteresting.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“These relics have a history then?'
'So much so that they are history.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“The statesman received us with that old-fashioned courtesy for which he is remarkable, and seated us on the two luxuriant lounges on either side of the fireplace. Standing on the rug between us, with his slight, tall figure, his sharp features, thoughtful face, and curling hair prematurely tinged with gray, he seemed to represent that not too common type, a nobleman who is in truth noble.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact—of absolute undeniable fact—from the embellishments of theorists and reporters.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“for nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person,”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which vital. Otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of being concentrated.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“Save for the occasional use of cocaine he had no vices,”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“...above all, do not fret until you know that you really have a cause for it.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

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“The earlier Aryan invaders of the Gangetic Plain presided over feasts of cattle, horses, goats, buffalo, and sheep. By later Vedic and early Hindu times, during the first millenium B.C., the feasts came to be managed by the priestly caste of Brahmans, who erected rituals of sacrifice around the killing of animals and distributed the meat in the name of the Aryan chiefs and war lords. After 600 B.C., when populations grew denser and domestic animals became proportionately scarcer, the eating of meat was progressively restricted until it became a monopoly of the Brahmans and their sponsors. Ordinary people struggled to conserve enough livestock to meet their own desperate requirements for milk, dung used as fuel, and transport. During this period of crisis, reformist religions arose, most prominently Buddhism and Jainism, that attempted to abolish castes and hereditary priesthoods and to outlaw the killing of animals. The masses embraced the new sects, and in the end their powerful support reclassified the cow into a sacred animal. So it appears that some of the most baffling of religious practices in history might have an ancestry passing in a straight line back to the ancient carnivorous habits of humankind. Cultural anthropologists like to stress that the evolution of religion proceeds down multiple, branching pathways. But these pathways are not infinite in number; they may not even be very numerous. It is even possible that with a more secure knowledge of human nature and ecology, the pathways can be enumerated and the directions of religious evolution in individual cultures explained with a high level of confidence.”
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