Arthur Conan Doyle · 321 pages
Rating: (69.1K votes)
“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
“Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.”
“Everything I have to say has already crossed your mind."
"Then possibly my answer has crossed yours.”
“It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.”
“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.”
“I never can resist a touch of the dramatic.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“To underestimate oneself is as much an exaggeration of one's powers than the other.”
“It’s every man’s business to see justice done.”
“In my inmost heart I believed that I could succeed where others failed, and now I had the opportunity to test myself.”
“If you are clever enough to bring destruction upon me, rest assured that I shall do as much to you.”
“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.”
“I follow my own methods, and tell as much or as little as I choose. That is the advantage of being unofficial.”
“...to underestimate one’s self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s own powers.”
“Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old lovers are the worst.”
“we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“These relics have a history then?'
'So much so that they are history.”
“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.”
“The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact—of absolute undeniable fact—from the embellishments of theorists and reporters.”
“for nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person,”
“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.”
“Save for the occasional use of cocaine he had no vices,”
“...above all, do not fret until you know that you really have a cause for it.”
“He was learning to live on several planes at once. The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment.”
“If thou art called to pass through tribulation; if thou art in perils among false brethren; if thou art in perils among robbers; if thou art in perils by land or by sea;
If thou art accused with all manner of false accusations; if thine enemies fall upon thee; if they tear thee from the society of thy father and mother and brethren and sisters; and if with a drawn sword thine enemies tear thee from the bosom of thy wife, and of thine offspring, and thine elder son, although but six years of age, shall cling to thy garments, and shall say, My father, my father, why can’t you stay with us? O, my father, what are the men going to do with you? and if then he shall be thrust from thee by the sword, and thou be dragged to prison, and thine enemies prowl around thee like wolves for the blood of the lamb;
And if thou shouldst be cast into the pit, or into the hands of murderers, and the sentence of death passed upon thee; if thou be cast into the deep; if the billowing surge conspire against thee; if fierce winds become thine enemy; if the heavens gather blackness, and all the elements combine to hedge up the way; and above all, if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good.
The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?”
“Now there’s something for you to think about. If you don’t know that you can’t do something, isn’t there a remote possibility that you’ll go ahead and do it anyway in absolute defiance of physical law? That might be one of the drawbacks of education. If you don’t know that you can’t pick yourself up by the scruff of the neck and hold yourself at arm’s length, maybe you can.”
“O you, who in some pretty boat,
Eager to listen, have been following
Behind my ship, that singing sails along
Turn back to look again upon your own shores;
Tempt not the deep, lest unawares,
In losing me, you yourselves might be lost.
The sea I sail has never yet been passed;
Minerva breathes, and pilots me Apollo,
And Muses nine point out to me the Bears.
You other few who have neck uplifted
Betimes to the bread of angels upon Which one lives and does not grow sated,
Well may you launch your vessel
Upon the deep sea.”
“The concept of a weary severed hand, exhausted from relentless creeping, made no sense.”
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