The Sign of the Four quotes

He shook his head sadly. “I glanced over it,” said he. “Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it.

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.”

He shook his head sadly. “I glanced over it,” said he. “Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. 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.

”

If you can say definitely, for example, that some murder has been done by a man who was smoking an Indian lunkah, it obviously narrows your field of search.

To the trained eye there is as much difference between the black ash of a Trichinopoly and the white fluff of bird’s-eye as there is between a cabbage and a potato.

”

I see also in your open desk there that you have a sheet of stamps and a thick bundle of postcards. What could you go into the post-office for, then, but to send a wire?

Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.

”

“

No, no: I never guess. It is a shocking habit⁠—destructive to the logical faculty.

What seems strange to you is only so because you do not follow my train of thought or observe the small facts upon which large inferences may depend. For example, I began by stating that your brother was careless.

“None. Hence the cocaine.

I cannot live without brain-work. What else is there to live for?

Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-colored houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material?

See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-colored houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers, doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them?

Crime is commonplace, existence is commonplace, and no qualities save those which are commonplace have any function upon earth.

”

“

I never make exceptions. An exception disproves the rule.

Have you ever had occasion to study character in handwriting? What do you make of this fellow’s scribble?”

There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghostlike in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light—sad faces and glad, haggard and merry.

Like all human kind, they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more.

I am not subject to impressions, but the dull, heavy evening, with the strange business upon which we were engaged, combined to make me nervous and depressed. I could see from Miss Morstan’s manner that she was suffering from the same feeling.

Our guide had left us the lantern. Holmes swung it slowly round, and peered keenly at the house, and at the great rubbish-heaps which cumbered the grounds. Miss Morstan and I stood together, and her hand was in mine.

A wondrous subtle thing is love, for here were we two who had never seen each other before that day, between whom no word or even look of affection had ever passed, and yet now in an hour of trouble our hands instinctively sought for each other.

I have marvelled at it since, but at the time it seemed the most natural thing that I should go out to her so, and, as she has often told me, there was in her also the instinct to turn to me for comfort and …

“You will not apply my precept,” he said, shaking his head. “

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

We know that he did not come through the door, the window, or the chimney. We also know that he could not have been concealed in the room, as there is no concealment possible. Whence, then, did he come?”

Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I.

How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of nature!

Are you well up in your Jean Paul?”

“That was like following the brook to the parent lake. He makes one curious but profound remark.

It is that the chief proof of man’s real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.

It argues, you see, a power of comparison and of appreciation which is in itself a proof of nobility. There is much food for thought in Richter. You have not a pistol, have you?”

“No: I am not tired. I have a curious constitution.

I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.

I am going to smoke and to think over this queer business to which my fair client has introduced us. If ever man had an easy task, this of ours ought to be.

“

Dirty-looking rascals, but I suppose everyone has some little immortal spark concealed about him.

You would not think it, to look at them. There is no a priori probability about it. A strange enigma is man!”

“He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to.

Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant.

So says the statistician. But do I see a handkerchief? Surely there is a white flutter over yonder.”

“Then I say, ‘Thank God,’ too,” she whispered, as I drew her to my side.

Whoever had lost a treasure, I knew that night that I had gained one.

“

In Worcestershire the life of a man seems a great and a sacred thing; but it is very different when there is fire and blood all round you and you have been used to meeting death at every turn.

Whether Achmet the merchant lived or died was a thing as light as air to me, but at the talk about the treasure my heart turned to it, and I thought of what I might do in the old country with it, and how my …

“

He was staunch and true, was little Tonga. No man ever had a more faithful mate.

At the night named he had his boat at the wharf. As it chanced, however, there was one of the convict-guard down there—a vile Pathan who had never missed a chance of insulting and injuring me.

They were a rum crowd, and Tonga and I soon managed to settle down among them.

They had one very good quality: they let you alone and asked no questions.

“Well, if I were to tell you all the adventures that my little chum and I went through, you would not thank me, for I would have you here until the sun was shining.