if i could be assured of your destruction, i would in the interest of the public, cheerfully accept my death.
It isn't true that the laws of nature have been capriciously disturbed; that snakes have talked; that women have been turned into salt; that rods have brought water out of rocks.
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.
I have already explained to you that what is out of the common is usually a guide rather than a hindrance.
It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?
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.
On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic.
The ideal reasoner, he remarked, would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.
[Sherlock Holmes:] The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.
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.
Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools.
The setting is a worthy one, if the devil did desire to have a hand in the affairs of men.
Well, sir, let us do what we can to curtail this visit, which can hardly be agreeable to you, and is inexpressibly irksome to me.
Why should people ever take credit for charity when they must know that they cannot gain as much pleasure out of their guineas in any other fashion?
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
'There's no need for fiction in medicine,' remarks Foster... 'for the facts will always beat anything you fancy.'
I get in the dumps at times, and don't open my mouth for days on end. You must not think I am sulky when I do that. Just let me alone, and I'll soon be right.
I have wrought my simple plan If I give one hour of joy To the boy who’s half a man, Or the man who’s half a boy.
A man with so large a brain must have something in it.
But love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things.
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.
We have much to hope from the flowers.
Was it hardness, was it selfishness, that she should ask me to risk my life for her own glorification? Such thoughts may come to middle age; but never to ardent three-and-twenty in the fever of his first love.
Living, as I do, in an educated and scientific atmosphere, I could not have conceived that the first principles of zoology were so little known. Is it possible that you do not know the elementary fact in comparative anatomy, that the wing of a bird is really the forearm, while the wing of a bat consists of three elongated fingers with membranes between?
I am engaged in answering that Italian buffoon, Mazotti, whose views upon the larval development of the tropical termites have excited my derision and contempt . . .
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