There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
There is no satisfaction in vengeance unless the offender has time to realise who it is that strikes him, and why retribution has come upon him.
There is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps.
There is a soul-jealousy that can be as frantic as any body-jealousy.
There are women in whom the love of a lover extinguishes all other loves, and I think that she must have been one.
The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.
The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest.
The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime.[to Sherlock]
The setting is a worthy one. If the devil did desire to have a hand in the affairs of men.
The past and the present are within the field of my inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.
The more outre and grotesque an incident is the more carefully it deserves to be examined.
The interplay of ideas and the oblique uses of knowledge are often of extraordinary interest.
