Let me run over the principal steps. We approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories. We were simply there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations.
No violence, gentlemen – no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture!
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.
I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.
If in 100 years I am only known as the man who invented Sherlock Holmes then I will have considered my life a failure.
My mind rebels at stagnation, give me problems, give me work!
The best way of successfully acting a part is to be it.
The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.
To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.
A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem.
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.
It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.
Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.
It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
You see, but you do not observe.
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor.
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
There is nothing more to be said or to be done tonight, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellowmen.
So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.
Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.