The devil’s agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?

Life, my dear Watson, is infinitely stranger than fiction; stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We could not conceive the things that are merely commonplace to existence. If we could hover over this great city, remove the roofs, and peep in at the things going on, it would make all fiction, with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions flat, stale and unprofitable.

A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem.

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.

No violence, gentlemen — no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture!

The future was with Fate. The present was our own.

Let me see. What are my other shortcomings?