Arthur Conan Doyle

Holy men? Holy cabbages! Holy bean-pods! What do they do but live and suck in sustenance and grow fat? If that be holiness, I could show you hogs in this forest who are fit to head the calendar. Think you it was for such a life that this good arm was fixed upon my shoulder, or that head placed upon your neck? There is work in the world, man, and it is not by hiding behind stone walls that we shall do it.

It was surely well for man that he came late in the order of creation. There were powers abroad in earlier days which no courage and no mechanism of his could have met. What could his sling, his throwing-stick, or his arrow avail him against such forces as have been loose tonight? Even with a modern rifle it would be all odds on the monster.

"I have the advantage of knowing your habits, my dear Watson," said he. "When your round is a short one you walk, and when it is a long one you use a hansom. As I perceive that your boots, although used, are by no means dirty, I cannot doubt that you are at present busy enough to justify the hansom."
"Excellent!" I cried.
"Elementary," said he. "It is one of those instances where the reasoner can produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbour, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction. The same may be said, my dear fellow, for the effect of some of these little sketches of yours, which is entirely meretricious, depending as it does upon your retaining in your own hands some factors in the problem which are never imparted to the reader."

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.

It was worth a wound - it was worth many wounds - to know the depth of loyalty and love that lay behind that cold mask.

Jealousy is a strange transformer of characters.

The past and the present are within my field of inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.

It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.

"I abhour the dull routine of existence" - Sherlock Holmes

...to underestimate one’s self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s own powers.

You cannot see the lettuce and the dressing without suspecting a salad.

presume nothing

It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away. Again and again it sounded, the whole air throbbing with it, strident, wild and menacing.

horses: dangerous on both ends and crafty in the middle

Of all ruins, that of a noble mind is the most deplorable.

- <i>The Adventure of the Dying Detective</i>