Every man finds his limitations, Mr. Holmes, but at least it cures us of the weakness of self-satisfaction.

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.

Was it hardness, was it selfishness, that she should ask me to risk my life for her own glorification? Such thoughts may come to middle age; but never to ardent three-and-twenty in the fever of his first love.

The unexpected has happened so continually in my life that it has ceased to deserve the name.

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.

One dumb-bell, Watson! Consider an athlete with one dumb-bell. Picture to yourself the unilateral development - the imminent danger of a spinal curvature. Shocking, Watson, shocking!