Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I never guess. It is a shocking habit - destructive to the logical faculty.

Like all Holmes' reasoning, the thing seemed simplicity itself when it was once explained. Dr. Watson, speaking of Sherlock Holmes.

Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.

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. Sherlock Holmes speaking with Dr. Watson.

It is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though perhaps a meretricious, effect.

What one man can invent another can discover. Sherlock Holmes speaking with Dr. Watson.

Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.

The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.

The bow was made in England: Of true wood, of yew wood. The wood of English bows.

"Excellent!" I [Watson] cried. "Elementary." said he [Holmes]. Watson talking to Sherlock Holmes in The Crooked Man