Great Throughts Treasury

"The Professor snorted like an angry buffalo. You really touch the limit, said he. You enlarge my view of the possible. Cerebral paresis! Mental inertia! Wonderful!"

"The sky was of the deepest blue, with a few white, fleecy clouds drifting lazily across it, and the air was filled with the low drone of insects or with a sudden sharper note as bee or bluefly shot past with its quivering, long-drawn hum, like an insect tuning-fork."

"The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard's blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbors, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser."

"The setting is a worthy one, if the devil did desire to have a hand in the affairs of men."

"The unexpected has happened so continually in my life that it has ceased to deserve the name."

"The true scientific mind is not to be tied down by its own conditions of time and space. It builds itself an observatory erected upon the border line of present, which separates the infinite past from the infinite future. From this sure post it makes its sallies even to the beginning and to the end of all things."

"Then possibly my answer has crossed yours."

"Then when the words were said, and man's form had tried to sanctify that which was already divine, we walked amid the pealings of the Wedding March into the vestry . . ."

"The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when [Holmes] became a specialist in crime."

"The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession."

"The Times is a paper which is seldom found in any hands but those of the highly educated."

"The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest."

"The weak man becomes strong when he has nothing, for then only can he feel the wild, mad thrill of despair."

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes."

"The whole force of the State is at your back if you should need it. I’m afraid that all the queen’s horses and all the queen’s men cannot avail in this matter."

"Then must you strive to be worthy of her love. Be brave and pure, fearless to the strong and humble to the weak; and so, whether this love prosper or no, you will have fitted yourself to be honored by a maiden's love, which is, in sooth, the highest guerdon which a true knight can hope for."

"There are no fools so troublesome as those of the mind."

"There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done."

"There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger's Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offenses, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders, and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere."

"There are one or two elementary rules to be observed in the way of handling patients, he remarked, seating himself on the table and swinging his legs. The most obvious is that you must never let them see that you want them. It should be pure condescension on your part seeing them at all; and the more difficulties you throw in the way of it, the more they think of it. Break your patients in early, and keep them well to heel."

"There are some trees, Watson, which grow to a certain height and then suddenly develop some unsightly eccentricity. You will see it often in humans. I have a theory that the individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors, and that such a sudden turn to good or evil stands for some strong influence which came into the line of his pedigree. The person becomes, as it were, the epitome of the history of his own family."

"Then, with your permission, we will leave it at that, Mr. Mac. The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession."

"There are in me the makings of a very fine loafer and also of a pretty spry sort of fellow."

"There are no crimes and no criminals in these days. What is the use of having brains in our profession? I know well that I have it in me to make my name famous. No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done. And what is the result? There is no crime to detect, or, at most, some bungling villainy with a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it."

"There are always some lunatics about. It would be a dull world without them."

"There are times, young fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right and justice, or you never feel clean again."

"There is a chill in the air after dark, and we had all drawn close to the blaze. The night was moonless, but there were some stars, and one could see for a little distance across the plain. Well, suddenly out of the darkness, out of the night, there swooped something with a swish like an aeroplane. The whole group of us were covered for an instant by a canopy of leathery wings, and I had a momentary vision of a long, snake-like neck, a fierce, red, greedy eye, and a great snapping beak, filled, to my amazement, with little, gleaming teeth."

"There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror."

"There is a soul-jealousy that can be as frantic as anybody-jealousy."

"There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman."

"There are women in whim the love of a lover extinguishes all other loves, and I think that she must have been one."

"There is no satisfaction in vengeance unless the offender has time to realize who it is that strikes him, and why retribution has come upon him."

"There is a danger there - a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?"

"There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book."

"There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you."

"There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion, said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers."

"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."

"There is nothing more unaesthetic than a policeman."

"There seems to me to be absolutely no limit to the inanity and credulity of the human race. Homo Sapiens! Homo idioticus!"

"There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before."

"There is nothing so deceptive as the distance of a light upon a pitch-dark night, and sometimes the glimmer seemed to be far away upon the horizon and sometimes it might have been within a few yards of us."

"There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world."

"There’s the cab, Hopkins, and you can remove your man. If you want me for the trial, my address and that of Watson will be somewhere in Norway –I’ll send particulars later."

"There was a lady at Santarem--but my lips are sealed. It is the part of a gallant man to say nothing, though he may indicate that he could say a great deal."

"There's more work to be got out of one of those little beggars than out of a dozen of the force, Holmes remarked. The mere sight of an official-looking person seals men's lips. These youngsters, however, go everywhere and hear everything. They are as sharp as needles, too; all they want is organization."

"There's a light in a woman's eyes that speaks louder than words."

"There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less and a cleaner, better stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared."

"There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colorless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it."

"They all agreed that it was a huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral. I have cross-examined these men, one of them a hard-headed countryman, one a farrier, and one a moorland farmer, who all tell the same story of this dreadful apparition, exactly corresponding to the hell-hound of the legend. I assure you that there is a reign of terror in the district, and that it is a hardy man who will cross the moor at night."

"These pictures are not occult, but they are psychic because everything that emanates from the human spirit or human brain is psychic. It is not supernatural; nothing is. It is preternatural in the sense that it is not known to our ordinary senses. It is the effect of the joining on the one hand of imagination, and on the other hand of some power of materialization. The imagination, I may say, comes from me — the materializing power from elsewhere."