Sherlock Holmes quotes from Elementary

Sherlock

(to Watson) You're a detective now, you tell me.

Sherlock

A good detective knows that every task, every interaction, no matter how seemingly banal, has the potential to contain multitudes. I live my life alert to this possibility. I expect my colleagues to do the same.

Sherlock

[To Watson] The thing that's different about me is you.

Sherlock Holmes

(to Moriarty) You said there was only one person in the world who could surprise you... turns out, there's two.

Sherlock

You've been tending to your self-defense. Well done.

Sherlock

I know all about poisons, Watson, I've become an expert on them. But over the past few years, I've come to understand that there is nothing on this planet so toxic as guilt.

Sherlock

No Belgian is that bad at backgammon.

Sherlock

First time in my career someone's alibi for murder has been that they were busy planning the same murder. If it weren't so frustrating, it would be interesting.

Sherlock

[to Mycroft] Would you kindly get in touch with the Marchioness? I would very much like to ask her why drug dealers want to murder her horse.

Sherlock

You must by now be aware of my opinions regarding food. My wants in life are simple: a loaf of bread and a clean collar. The ritualization-slash-fetishization of eating is as egregious a waste of time as I can think of.

Sherlock

[voice-over, in a letter to Moriarty] We have spilled much ink, you and I, in our discussion of human connection, and we're no closer to understanding than we were when our correspondence began. I often feel as if I am standing on one side of a wide chasm, shouting across, and wondering if the response I hear comes from you, or if it is my own voice, echoing back to me. It seems to me, on my side of the canyon, the search for unity with another is the font of much of the world's unhappiness. I watch as Watson, eager as ever to extract some meaning from the prevailing social conventions, endures a series of curated mating rituals. It seems to me that she's incrementally less content each time she returns from one. I conduct myself as though I'm above matters of the heart, chiefly because I have seen them corrode people I respect. But in my candid moments I sometimes wonder if I take the stance I do because "love," for lack of a better word, is a game that I fail to understand, and so I opt not to play. After all, if I truly had the purity of all my convictions, I wouldn't regret so many of the things I've done, nor would I persist against many of my better instincts in this correspondence. I find you a challenge; one that, in spite of all that you've done, continues to stimulate. And so the conversation - futile though it may finally be - continues, and we are left to wonder, have we simply failed to find the answers to the questions that preoccupy us, or can they not be answered at all? Fortunately for both of us, the world always presents the next diversion - the next elaborate distraction - from the problems that vex...

Sherlock

[to Joan, re Moriarty] The woman is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma I've had sex with. I would be lying if I said I was the strongest assessor of her motives at this point.

Sherlock Holmes

All of history can be viewed through the lens of who stole whose maps. Each discovery, every war, the rise and fall of empires all turned on cartographic espionage.

Sherlock Holmes

It really is quite remarkable to me. All this time we've spent together, and you remain a far more interesting person than you give yourself credit for.

Sherlock Holmes

My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis and I'm in my very own atmosphere. I can dispense with old cravings and bad habits, but I abhor the dull routine of existence.