A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.

I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.

Well, I'm a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye.

Of all ruins, that of a noble mind is the most deplorable.

Amberley excelled at chess - a mark, Watson, of a scheming mind.

If in 100 years I am only known as the man who invented Sherlock Holmes then I will have considered my life a failure.

"There are one or two elementary rules to be observed in the way of handling patients," he remarked, seating himself on the table and swinging his legs. "The most obvious is that you must never let them see that you want them. It should be pure condescension on your part seeing them at all; and the more difficulties you throw in the way of it, the more they think of it. Break your patients in early, and keep them well to heel."