Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them.

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

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.

If you want to write good copy, you must be where the things are.

"I have seen those symptoms before," said Holmes, throwing his cigarette into the fire. "Oscillation upon the pavement always means an affaire de coeur."

If the man who observes the myriad stars, and considers that they and their innumerable satellites move in their serene dignity through the heavens, each swinging clear of the other's orbit-if, I say, the man who sees this cannot realise the Creator's attributes without the help of the book of Job, then his view of things is beyond my understanding.

...while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.