Quotes · verified word for word in the text
A Study in Scarlet quotes
12 quotes from A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle. Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #244 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.
— Spoken by a character · IV. WHAT JOHN RANCE HAD TO TELL
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.”
— Spoken by a character · III. THE LAURISTON GARDENS MYSTERY
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.
— Spoken by a character · II. THE SCIENCE OF DEDUCTION
“To a great mind, nothing is little,” remarked Holmes, sententiously.
— Holmes · VI. TOBIAS GREGSON SHOWS WHAT HE CAN DO
“One’s ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,” he answered.
— Spoken by a character · V. OUR ADVERTISEMENT BRINGS A VISITOR
There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror.
— Spoken by a character · V. OUR ADVERTISEMENT BRINGS A VISITOR
No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so.
His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.
So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.
— Spoken by a character · II. THE SCIENCE OF DEDUCTION
Desultory readers are seldom remarkable for the exactness of their learning.
“They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains,” he remarked with a smile. “It’s a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.”
— Spoken by a character · III. THE LAURISTON GARDENS MYSTERY
I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air—or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.