Quote collection
426 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones."
"Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius."
"When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking."
"Where there is no imagination there is no horror."
"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes."
"It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important."
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."
"Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent."
"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose."
"London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained."
"When the impossible has been eliminated, all that remains no matter how improbable is possible."
"While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician."
"How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!"
"Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner."
"Any truth is better than indefinite doubt."
"It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it."
"As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify."
"I'm not a psychopath, I'm a fully functioning sociopath. Do your research."
"My dear Watson," said [Sherlock Holmes], "I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one's self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one's own powers."
"Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid."