... when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth
Source: The Sign of the Four (1890)
Topic
From Kierkegaard's paradox — the truth catches you rather than the reverse — to Mill's patient argument that personal experience is required to understand what you have only read, the collection takes the difficulty of truth seriously. Blake will defend what he knows; Browning's mind searches for its own kind of truth. The harder pieces — Clifford on the ethics of belief, Bastiat on natural law — demand that truth be earned through investigation. Keats finds it through beauty; Irving notes how quickly fact becomes fable. The through-line is that truth is costly: it demands letting go of more comfortable positions, saying what you see even when it is unwelcome, and remaining willing to be corrected.
... when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife
Every thing possible to be believed is an image of truth
Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.
It is wrong always, everywhere and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
The horror! The horror!
My own belief is that our cause, the cause of justice, and its supporters, will prove stronger in every emergency than the traitor and the foreigner.