Intuition Sherlock Holmes Quotes

Everything I have to say has already crossed your mind." "Then possibly my answer has crossed yours.

Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues. He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen* and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!

Guessing is a weakness brought on by indolence and should never be confused with intuition.

All my instincts are one way, and all the facts are the other, and I much fear that British juries have not yet attained that pitch of intelligence when they will give the preference to my theories over Lestrade's facts.

The relations between us in those latter days were peculiar. He was a man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits, and I had become one of them. As an institution I was like the violin, the shag tobacco, the old black pipe, the index books, and others perhaps less excusable. When it was a case of active work and a comrade was needed upon whose nerve he could place some reliance, my role was obvious. But apart from this I had uses. I was a whetstone for his mind. I stimulated him. He liked to think aloud in my presence. His remarks could hardly be said to be made to me--many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead--but none the less, having formed the habit, it had become in some way helpful that I should register and interject. If I irritated him by a certain methodical slowness in my mentality, that irritation served only to make his own flame-like intuitions and impressions flash up the more vividly and swiftly. Such was my humble role in our alliance.

The swing of his nature took him from extreme languor to devouring energy; and as I knew well, he was never so truly formidable as when, for days on end, he had been lounging in his armchair amid his improvisations and his black-letter editions. Then it was that the lust of the chase would suddenly come upon him, and that his brilliant reasoning power would rise to the level of intuition, until those who were unacquainted with his methods would look askance at him as on a man whose knowledge was not that of other mortals. When I saw him that afternoon so enwrapped in the music of St. James's Hall I felt that an evil time might be coming upon those whom he had set himself to hunt down.

I had no keener pleasure than in following Holmes in his professional investigations, and in admiring the rapid deductions, as swift as intuitions, and yet always founded on a logical basis, with which he unravelled the problems which were submitted to him. I rapidly threw on my clothes, and was ready in a few minutes to accompany my friend down to the sitting-room. A lady dressed in black and heavily veiled, who had been sitting in the window, rose as we entered. 'Good morning, madam, said Holmes, cheerily. 'My name is Sherlock Holmes. This is my intimate friend and associate, Dr. Watson, before whom you can speak as freely as before myself.

I had no keener pleasure than in following Holmes in his professional investigations, and in admiring the rapid deductions, as swift as intuitions, and yet always founded on a logical basis with which he unraveled the problems which were submitted to him.

There can be no supernatural elements, no secret passages, no imaginary poisons, no Chinamen, no twins, no mystical intuitive powers, and the detective himself can’t have done it. To them I would add several further moratoria: no more alcoholic policemen with dead wives, no autistic idiot-savant crime-scene specialists, no oppressed female detectives derided by sexist colleagues, no overweight computer nerds in dimly lit rooms, no erudite killers arranging corpses in tableaux reminiscent of medieval paintings, no renegade detectives sharing a psychic bond with the killer, no cryptic messages hidden in museums by victims, no opera-loving loners who solve crimes because without them their lives would have no meaning, and absolutely no more reinventions of Sherlock Bloody Holmes

Absent Holmes, the Watson storytelling approach is the natural, instinctive one. And absent Holmes’s insistence, it is incredibly difficult to resist our desire to form narratives, to tell stories even if they may not be altogether correct, or correct at all. We like simplicity. We like concrete reasons. We like causes. We like things that make intuitive sense (even if that sense happens to be wrong).

Intuitions are not to be ignored, Watson. They represent data processed too fast for the conscious mind to comprehend.” —Sherlock Holmes (Wink)

However, the mind has an amazing ability to continue worrying away at a problem all on its own, so that when the 'Eureka!' comes it is as mysterious as if it were God speaking. The words given voice inside the mind are not always clear, however; they can be gentle and elliptical, what the prophets called the bat qol, the daughter of the voice of God, she who speaks in whispers and half-seen images.