“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.”

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

“So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.”

“It's a wicked world, and when a clever man turns his brain to crime it is the worst of all.”

“Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”

“He burst into one of his rare fits of laughter as he turned away from the picture. I have not heard him laugh often, and it has always boded ill to somebody.”

“I never can resist a touch of the dramatic.”

“I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland”

“Picnics are very dear to those who are in the first stage of the tender passion.”

“My mind rebels at stagnation, give me problems, give me work!”

“…but it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all.”

“His Ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.”

“‎A change of work is the best rest.”

“One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature”

“Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”

“When a man does a queer thing, or two queer things, there may be a meaning to it, but when everything he does is queer, then you begin to wonder”

“I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air -- or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.”

“It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?”

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

“You wish to put me in the dark. I tell you that I will never be put in the dark. You wish to beat me. I tell you that you will never beat me.”

“I could not rest, Watson, I could not sit quiet in my chair, if I thought that such a man as Professor Moriarty were walking the streets of London unchallenged.”

“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 is a soul-jealousy that can be as frantic as any body-jealousy.”

“It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

“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.”

“His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing... My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System.”

“horses: dangerous on both ends and crafty in the middle”

“If in 100 years I am only known as the man who invented Sherlock Holmes then I will have considered my life a failure.”

“It seems to leave the darkness rather blacker than before.”

“That which is clearly known hath less terror than that which is but hinted at and guessed.”

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

“It is easy to be wise after the event.”

“The best way of successfully acting a part is to be it.”

“Some people's affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls.”

“You yourself may not be luminous, but you are a conductor of light.”

“To underestimate oneself is as much an exaggeration of one's powers than the other.”

“Even the best of us are thrown off some- times.”

“It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?”

“Accounts are not quite settled between us," said she, with a passion that equaled my own. "I can love, and I can hate. You had your choice. You chose to spurn the first; now you must test the other.”

“He is not a bad fellow, though an absolute imbecile in his profession. He has one positive virtue. He is as brave as a bulldog and as tenacious as a lobster if he gets his claws upon anyone.”

“I have taken to living by my wits.”

“My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill.”

“What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instinct of beasts.”

“No violence, gentlemen — no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture!”

“I suppose I shall have to compound a felony, as usual.”

“So we stood hand-in-hand, like two children, and there was peace in our hearts for all the dark things that surrounded us.”

“when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

“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.”

“He seems to have declared war on the King’s English as well as on the English king.”

“Jealousy is a strange transformer of characters.”