I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather.

I suppose I shall have to compound a felony as usual.

Work is the best antidote to sorrow, my dear Watson.

You wish to put me in the dark. I tell you that I will never be put in the dark. You wish to beat me. I tell you that you will never beat me.

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

Was it hardness, was it selfishness, that she should ask me to risk my life for her own glorification? Such thoughts may come to middle age; but never to ardent three-and-twenty in the fever of his first love.

When we think how narrow and devious this path of nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great and terrible possibilities loom ever shadowly upwards, it is a bold and a confident man who will put a limit to the strange by-oaths into which the human spirit may wander.