Violence is sometimes a duty.

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.

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 ... Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them. The only point in the case which deserved mention was the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes, by which I succeeded in unravelling it.'' —Sherlock Holmes on John Watson's "pamphlet", "A Study in Scarlet".

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

Jealousy is a strange transformer of characters.

Well, I'm a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye.

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