A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the theory of reincarnation.
Hot hate is twin brother to hot love.
One dumb-bell, Watson! Consider an athlete with one dumb-bell. Picture to yourself the unilateral development – the imminent danger of a spinal curvature. Shocking, Watson, shocking!
A man with so large a brain must have something in it.
Clouds of insects danced and buzzed in the golden autumn light, and the air was full of the piping of the song-birds. Long, glinting dragonflies shot across the path, or hung tremulous with gauzy wings and gleaming bodies.
How wise and how merciful is that provision of nature by which his earthly anchor is usually loosened by many little imperceptible tugs, until his consciousness has drifted out of its untenable earthly harbor into the great sea beyond!
I think you want a little unofficial help. Three undetected murders in one year won’t do, Lestrade. But you handled the Molesey Mystery with less than your usual – that’s to say, you handled it fairly well.
Even the best of us are thrown off some- times.
Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it.
Keep your revolver near you night and day, and never relax your precautions.
Amberley excelled at chess – a mark, Watson, of a scheming mind.
The most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.
The grand thing is to be able to reason backwards.
Desultory readers are seldom remarkable for the exactness of their learning.
The approach to the offices of Girdlestone and Co. was not a very dignified one, nor would the uninitiated who traversed it form any conception of the commercial prosperity of the firm in question.
The great bell of Beaulieu was ringing. Far away through the forest might be heard its musical clangor and swell.
The husband was a teetotaller, there was no other woman, and the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife.
Violence recoils on the violent.
When you have eliminated the impossible, what is left, no matter how unlikely, is the truth.
And once again Mr. Sherlock Holmes is free to devote his life to examining those interesting little problems which the complexity of human life so pletifuly presents.