The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest.

There is a danger there - a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?

For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.

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.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless.