Commonplace
I keep these lines because they return to a question I find difficult to leave alone: what can we infer about a mind from what it does?
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“Only Muggles talk of ‘mind reading.’ The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure. Thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by any invader. The mind is a complex and many-layered thing, Potter—or at least, most minds are.”
Severus Snape, in J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003), Chapter 24, “Occlumency”§
Snape’s retort in Harry’s first Occlumency lesson, after Harry gives Legilimency that name.
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“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.”
Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887), Part I, Chapter II, “The Science of Deduction”§
Holmes says this immediately after learning the earth goes round the sun and replying, “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
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“The proper study of mankind is man.”
Dr. John Watson, in Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887), Part I, Chapter I, “Mr. Sherlock Holmes” — quoting Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733–34), Epistle II§
Watson says it walking away from his first meeting with Holmes, still wondering how Holmes knew, unasked, that he had come from Afghanistan. Stamford, who introduced them, replies: “You must study him, then… You’ll find him a knotty problem, though.”
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“There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first.”
Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887), Part I, Chapter II, “The Science of Deduction”§
From the speech in which Holmes first explains his trade — “I suppose I am the only one in the world. I’m a consulting detective” — moments after admitting to Watson that he himself wrote the magazine article on deduction Watson had just ridiculed.