There is but one step from the grotesque to the horrible.
Dogs don’t make mistakes.
Might I trouble you to open the window, for chloroform vapour does not help the palate.
When once your point of view is changed, the very thing which was so damning becomes a clue to the truth.
My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.
There is a soul-jealousy that can be as frantic as any body-jealousy.
The good Watson had at that time deserted me for a wife, the only selfish action I can recall in our association. I was alone.
Life, it turns out, is infinitely more clever and adaptable than anyone had ever supposed.
When people bury treasure nowadays they do it in the Post-Office bank.
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.
Every man finds his limitations, Mr. Holmes, but at least it cures us of the weakness of self-satisfaction.
We must look for consistency. Where there is a want of it we must suspect deception.
Should I ever marry, Watson, I should hope to inspire my wife with some feeling which would prevent her from being walked off by a housekeeper when my corpse was lying within a few yards of her.
Well, sir, let us do what we can to curtail this visit, which can hardly be agreeable to you, and is inexpressibly irksome to me.
His neighbor is a tooth-drawer. That bag at his girdle is full of the teeth that he drew at Winchester fair. I warrant that there are more sound ones than sorry, for he is quick at his work and a trifle dim in the eye.
Streams may spring from one source and yet some may be clear and some be foul.
He seems to have declared war on the King’s English as well as on the English king.
What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instinct of beasts.
My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.
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!