cimorene

1. “My merits are grossly undervalued by a stiff-necked and obtuse generation. But what would you have, my learned brother? If poverty steps behind you and claps the occulting bushel over your thirty thousand candle-power luminary, your brilliancy is apt to be obscured.”
— R Austin Freeman, The Red Thumb Mark

2. By lovers of paradox we are assured that it is the unexpected that will always happen. But this is, to put it mildly, an exaggeration. Even the expected happens sometimes.
— R Austin Freeman, The Stoneware Monkey

3. the obvious plaster of which had been varnished by some optimist in the hope that they might thereby be mistaken for bronze
— R Austin Freeman, The Penrose Mystery

4. "[Y]ou are barking up the wrong tree.”
“Am I?” said Miller. “Then if you will point out the right tree, I’ll bark up that."
— R Austin Freeman, Dr Thorndyke Intervenes

5. “Mere absurdity or improbability,” replied Thorndyke, “can hardly be considered as excluding any particular explanation. The appearance of this seal in these circumstances is grotesquely improbable. It appears to be an impossibility. Yet there is the devastating fact that it has happened. We can hardly expect a probable or even plausible explanation of so abnormal a fact; but among the various improbable explanations, one must be true. All that we can do is to search for the one that is the least improbable[.]"
— R Austin Freeman, Pontifex, Son and Thorndyke