The highest morality may prove also to be the highest wisdom when the half-told story comes to be finished.
His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.
How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?
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.
I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.
I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.
It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
The more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawning of time.
As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.
As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.
Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau's example.
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.
For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.