“I cannot live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the duncoloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material?”

“It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.”

“There's a light in a woman's eyes that speaks louder than words.”

“Life, it turns out, is infinitely more clever and adaptable than anyone had ever supposed.”

“Anything is better than stagnation.”

“I am not the law, but I represent justice so far as my feeble powers go.”

“It is quite a three pipe problem, and I beg that you won't speak to me for fifty minutes.”

“There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done.”

“They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," he remarked with a smile. "It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.”

“A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.”

“The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive.”

“I dislike my fellow-mortals. Justice compels me to add that they appear for the most part to dislike me.

“The devil’s agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?”

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

“The future was with Fate. The present was our own.

“I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of daily life.”

“It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.”

“A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.”

“Should I ever marry, Watson, I should hope to inspire my wife with some feeling which would prevent her from being walked off by a housekeeper when my corpse was lying within a few yards of her.”

“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.”

“When once your point of view is changed, the very thing which was so damning becomes a clue to the truth.”

“As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is, the less mysterious it proves to be.”

“The chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.”

“You know my methods. Apply them.”

“There are times, young fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right and justice, or you never feel clean again.”

“The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when [Holmes] became a specialist in crime.”

“So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.”

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

“Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”

“He burst into one of his rare fits of laughter as he turned away from the picture. I have not heard him laugh often, and it has always boded ill to somebody.”

“I never can resist a touch of the dramatic.”

“I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland”

“Picnics are very dear to those who are in the first stage of the tender passion.”

“My mind rebels at stagnation, give me problems, give me work!”

“…but it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all.”

“His Ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.”

“‎A change of work is the best rest.”

“One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature”

“Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”

“When a man does a queer thing, or two queer things, there may be a meaning to it, but when everything he does is queer, then you begin to wonder”

“I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air -- or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.”

“It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?”

“There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.”

“You wish to put me in the dark. I tell you that I will never be put in the dark. You wish to beat me. I tell you that you will never beat me.”

“I could not rest, Watson, I could not sit quiet in my chair, if I thought that such a man as Professor Moriarty were walking the streets of London unchallenged.”

“There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.”

“There is a soul-jealousy that can be as frantic as any body-jealousy.”

“It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

“There is no satisfaction in vengeance unless the offender has time to realize who it is that strikes him, and why retribution has come upon him.”

“His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing... My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System.”