Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.

[Sherlock Holmes:] The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.

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

...Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.

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

Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.

An absence of antecedents and of relatives is sometimes an aid rather than an impediment to social advancement . . .