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

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

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.

It’s every man’s business to see justice done.

For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.

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

Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.