“horses: dangerous on both ends and crafty in the middle”

“If in 100 years I am only known as the man who invented Sherlock Holmes then I will have considered my life a failure.”

“It seems to leave the darkness rather blacker than before.”

“That which is clearly known hath less terror than that which is but hinted at and guessed.”

“There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror.”

“It is easy to be wise after the event.”

“The best way of successfully acting a part is to be it.”

“Some people's affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls.”

“You yourself may not be luminous, but you are a conductor of light.”

“To underestimate oneself is as much an exaggeration of one's powers than the other.”

“Even the best of us are thrown off some- times.”

“It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?”

“Accounts are not quite settled between us," said she, with a passion that equaled my own. "I can love, and I can hate. You had your choice. You chose to spurn the first; now you must test the other.”

“He is not a bad fellow, though an absolute imbecile in his profession. He has one positive virtue. He is as brave as a bulldog and as tenacious as a lobster if he gets his claws upon anyone.”

“I have taken to living by my wits.”

“My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill.”

“What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instinct of beasts.”

“No violence, gentlemen — no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture!”

“I suppose I shall have to compound a felony, as usual.”

“So we stood hand-in-hand, like two children, and there was peace in our hearts for all the dark things that surrounded us.”

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

“The past and the present are within my field of inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.”

“He seems to have declared war on the King’s English as well as on the English king.”

“Jealousy is a strange transformer of characters.”

“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.”

“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?”

“To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.”

“His love of danger, his intense appreciation of the drama of an adventure--all the more intense for being held tightly in--his consistent view that every peril in life is a form of sport, a fierce game betwixt you and Fate, with Death as a forfeit, made him a wonderful companion at such hours.”

“When a man writes on a wall, his instinct leads him to write above the level of his own eyes.”

“...it is only when a man goes out into the world with the thought that there are heroisms all round him, and with the desire all alive in his heart to follow any which may come within sight of him, that he breaks away... from the life he knows, and ventures forth into the wonderful mystic twilight land where lie the great adventures and the great rewards.”

“It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn. This murder would have been infinitely more difficult to unravel had the body of the victim been simply found lying in the roadway without any of those outré and sensational accompaniments which have rendered it remarkable. These strange details, far from making the case more difficult, have really had the effect of making it less so.”

“But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color 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.”

“The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest.”

“How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!”

“To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”

“I think that I had better go, Holmes."

“There are no crimes and no criminals in these days. What is the use of having brains in our profession? I know well that I have it in me to make my name famous. No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done. And what is the result? There is no crime to detect, or, at most, some bungling villainy with a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it.”

“It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away. Again and again it sounded, the whole air throbbing with it, strident, wild and menacing.”

“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex…there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.”

“For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain.”

“You mentioned your name as if I should recognize it, but beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you.”

“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.”

“I felt Holmes's hand steal into mine and give me a reassuring shake.

“Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to use all the facts which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclopaedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment.”

“A wondrous subtle thing is love, for here were we two, who had never seen each other before that day, between whom no word or even look of affection had ever passed, and yet now in an hour of trouble our hands instinctively sought for each other… So we stood hand in hand like two children, and there was peace in our hearts for all the dark things that surrounded us.”

“A fine thought in fine language is a most precious jewel, and should not be hid away, but be exposed for use and ornament.”

“There is a danger there - a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?”

“A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony, and there are no red-headed clients to vex us with their conundrums.”

“Some believe what separates men from animals is our ability to reason. Others say it’s language or romantic love, or opposable thumbs. Living here in this lost world, I’ve come to believe it is more than our biology. What truly makes us human is our unending search, our abiding desire for immortality.”

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