Desultory readers are seldom remarkable for the exactness of their learning.

I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.

Amberley excelled at chess - a mark, Watson, of a scheming mind.

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

On general principles, it is best that I should not leave the country. Scotland Yard feels lonely without me, and it causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes.

I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.

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".