A Few Lessons from Sherlock Holmes

To choose a road, to stop habitually and to ask whether you have not gone astray, that is the true method.

The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish.

Our divisions into sciences are not a part of nature...in nature there is really neither chemistry nor physics, nor zoology, nor physiology, nor pathology; there are only bodies to be classified or phenomena to be known and mastered.

It is easy to be wise after the event, but very difficult to be wiser It is easy to be wise after the event. (Holmes; Thor Bridge) “How absurdly simple”, I cried. “Quite so...Every problem becomes very childish when once it is explained to you.” (Holmes; The Dancing Men)

realize that if you ask people to account for “facts”, they usually spend more time finding reasons for them than finding out whether they are true...They skip over the facts but carefully deduce inferences. They normally begin thus: “How does this come about?” But does it do so? That is what they ought to be asking. (Montaigne)

He [Doyle] created a shrewd, quick-sighted, inquisitive man...with plenty of spare time, a retentive memory, and perhaps with the best gift of all - the power of unloading the mind of all burden of trying to remember unnecessary details.

Physicians often pride themselves on curing all their patients with a remedy that they use. But the first thing to ask them is whether they have tried doing nothing, i.e., not treating other patients; for how can they otherwise know whether the remedy or nature cured them?

Patience - Take time to think things over Sherlock Holmes was a man...who,

It we could see the world the way others see it, we easier understand why they do what they do