Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.

The more outré and grotesque an incident is the more carefully it deserves to be examined.

I rose to go, but Holmes caught me by my wrist and pushed me back into my chair. 'It is both, or none,' said he. 'You may say before this gentleman anything which you may say to me.

It is decreed by a merciful Nature that the human brain cannot think of two things simultaneously . . .

How wise and how merciful is that provision of nature by which his earthly anchor is usually loosened by many little imperceptible tugs, until his consciousness has drifted out of its untenable earthly harbor into the great sea beyond!

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

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