Alexander Lyovkin

sere and yellow

It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.”

In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backward. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practise it much. In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forward, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically.”

if you describe a train of events to them will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backward, or analytically.”

Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it.

where there is no imagination there is no horror.

“I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears to be opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation.

It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery.

The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious, because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn.

These strange details, far from making the case more difficult, have really had the effect of making it less so