It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.

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

No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done.

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

We have much to hope from the flowers.

On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic.