Quotes

My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.

To Sherlock Holmes she [Irene Adler] is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.

Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labor, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been to China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.

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.

It is cocaine . . . a seven per cent solution.

The only unofficial consulting detective. I am the last and highest court of appeal in detection.

There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colorless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.

“Wonderful!” I ejaculated.

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.

You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.

[ The first encounter between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson :] “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”

“How on earth did you know that?”

Poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America. . . . We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there’s a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.

Billie Holiday’s burned voice

The story of our inferiority is an old dodge, as I have said; for wherever men oppress their fellows, wherever they enslave them, they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved.

In all the relations of life and death, we are met by the color line.

The relation subsisting between the white and colored people of this country is the great, paramount, imperative, and all-commanding question for this age and nation to solve.

The destiny of the colored American . . . is the destiny of America.

The man who is right is a majority. He who has God and conscience on his side, has a majority against the universe. Though he does not represent the present state, he represents the future state. If he does not represent what we are, he represents what we ought to be.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham.

[ On the proposal to send American blacks to colonize Liberia :] Our minds are made up to live here if we can, or die here if we must; so every attempt to remove us will be, as it ought to be, labor lost. Here we are, and here we shall remain.

No, I make no pretension to patriotism. So long as my voice can be heard on this or the other side of the Atlantic, I will hold up America to the lightning scorn of moral indignation. In doing this, I shall feel myself discharging the duty of a true patriot; for he is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.

You have seen how a man was made a slave;

We have all come out of Gogol’s Overcoat .

They have their Hamlets, but we still have our Karamazovs!

Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?

We have corrected Thy work and have founded it upon miracle, mystery , and authority . And men rejoiced that they were again led like sheep, and that the terrible gift that brought them such suffering, was, at last, lifted from their hearts.

The world will be saved by beauty.

I agree that two times two is four is an excellent thing; but if we’re going to start praising everything, then two times two is five is sometimes also a most charming little thing.

[ Letter to his wife, after being dismissed from the service of his father-in-law :] John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done.

No man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

If poisonous minerals, and if that tree,

[ To Edward Bulwer-Lytton :] Damn your principles! Stick to your party.

Mollify it with thy tears, or sweat, or blood.

[ Correcting proofs of his last parliamentary speech, 31 Mar. 1881 :] I will not go down to posterity talking bad grammar.

[ Replying to anti-Semitic taunting in the House of Commons :] Yes, I am a Jew! When the ancestors of the honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple!

[ To an author who had sent him an unsolicited manuscript :] Many thanks; I shall lose no time in reading it.

[ On his deathbed, declining a visit from Queen Victoria :] No it is better not. She would only ask me to take a message to Albert.

[ On becoming prime minister in 1868 :] I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole.

[ Of attacks in Parliament :] Never complain and never explain.

[ Of William E. Gladstone :] A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.

[ Of the Treasury Bench :] You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes.

Finality is not the language of politics.

All the great things have been done by little nations. It is the Jordan and the Ilyssus which have civilized the modern races.

Tobacco is the tomb of love.

Christianity is completed Judaism, or it is nothing. Christianity is incomprehensible without Judaism, as Judaism is incomplete without Christianity.

Let me see property acknowledging as in the old days of faith, that labor is his twin brother.

If you wish to be great, you must give men new ideas, you must teach them new words, you must modify their manners, you must change their laws, you must root out prejudices, subvert convictions. Greatness no longer depends on rentals: the world is too rich; nor on pedigrees: the world is too knowing.