"Recognising, as I do, that you are the second highest expert in Europe" "Indeed, sir! May I inquire who has the honour to be the first?" Asked Holmes, with some asperity. "To the man of precised, scientific mind the work of Monsieur Bertillon must always appeal strongly." "Then had you not better consult him?" "I said, sir, to the precisely scientific mind. But as a practical man of affairs it is acknowledged that you stand alone. I trust, sir, that I have not inadvertently--" "Just a little," said Holmes.

Streams may spring from one source, and yet some be clear and some be foul.

What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instinct of beasts.

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.

...while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.

Come, Watson, come!" he cried. The game is afoot.

[Sherlock Holmes:] The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.