I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.

Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the inquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems.

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.

Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.

There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.

No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so.

Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.