“There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact.”
“Where there is no imagination there is no horror.”
“There is nothing more unaesthetic than a policeman.”
“A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem.”
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”
“All other men are specialists, but his specialty is omniscience.”
“Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.”
“I never guess. It is a shocking habit -- destructive to the logical faculty.”
“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.”
“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
“When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.”
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
“When the impossibility has been eliminated, whatever remains, no matter how improbable... is possible.”
“Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them.”
“Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.”
“I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.”
“From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.”
“I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.”
“You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.”
“Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.”
“A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.”
“Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
“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.”
“My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”
“Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud stains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.”
“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”