If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive.

It is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though perhaps a meretricious, effect.

To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the countryside, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year, Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed, The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation--sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles.

I have taken to living by my wits.

It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons.

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

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