The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest.

He seems to have declared war on the King’s English as well as on the English king.

...Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.

It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery.

It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.

If the fresh facts come to our knowledge all fit themselves into the scheme, then our hypothesis may gradually become a solution. Sherlock Holmes speaking with Dr. Watson.

Yet birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when one of these harsh facts springs out upon a man at some sudden turn of the path of life, it dashes off for the moment his mask of civilization and gives a glimpse of the stranger and stronger face below.