Arthur Conan Doyle

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

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

"To a great mind, nothing is little."

"Of all ghosts, the ghosts of our old loves are the worst."

"There are seventy-five perfumes, which it is very necessary that a criminal expert should be able to distinguish from each other, and cases have more than once within my own experience depended upon their prompt recognition."

"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."

"It would be superfluous todrive us mad, my dear Watson"

"I am afraid that I rather give myself away when I explain," said he. "Results without causes are much more impressive."

"My job is to know what other people do not know."

"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."

"Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill."

"The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there's no room for romance anywhere."

"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."

"Some friend of yours, perhaps"Except yourself I have none," he answered. "I do not encourage visitors."

"That's rather a broad idea," I remarked. "One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature," he answered."

"Art in the blood is liable to take the strongest forms"

"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."

"You know, Watson, I don't mind confessing to you that I have always had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal. --Sherlock Holmes"

"The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive."

"For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination."