We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination.
There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically.
I have mastered the principles of several religions. They have all shocked me by the violence which I should have to do to my reason to accept the dogmas of any one of them.
It is a fool’s plan to teach a man to be a cur in peace, and think that he will be a lion in war.
Let us hear the suspicions. I will look after the proofs.
Nature is the true revelation of the Deity to man. The nearest green field is the inspired page from which you may read all that it is needful for you to know.
Once or twice in my career I feel that I have done more real harm by my discovery of the criminal than ever he had done by his crime. I have learned caution now, and I had rather play tricks with the law of England than with my own conscience.
Perhaps, when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand.
So complex is the human spirit that it can itself scarce discern the deep springs which impel it to action.
The more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawning of time.
It is the small men and not the great who hold their noses in the air.
I have already explained to you that what is out of the common is usually a guide rather than a hindrance.
On general principles, it is best that I should not leave the country. Scotland Yard feels lonely without me, and it causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes.
If the fresh facts come to our knowledge all fit themselves into the scheme, then our hypothesis may gradually become a solution. Sherlock Holmes speaking with Dr. Watson.
I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.
Ah! my dear Watson, there we come into those realms of conjecture, where the most logical mind may be at fault. Sherlock Holmes speaking with Dr. Watson.
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.
His sanguine spirit turns every firefly into a star.
Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner.
It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognise out of a number of facts which are incidental and which are vital.