Sphinx Quotes

Older recordings just seemed to take me somewhere into my own pre-history. That's always been an interesting, sort of sphinx-like territory for me to wander around in.

You are afraid of me, because I talk like a sphinx.

You can't escape the puking sphinx.

Sphinxes without secrets.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.

It's like the riddle of the Sphinx... why are there so many great unmarried women, and no great unmarried men?

In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.

Can’t you nudge her into submission? (Taryn) Are you kidding? As stubborn as she is? I’d fry my brain trying. (Sphinx)

I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.

Pity for him who one day looks uponhis inward sphinx and questions it. He is lost.

It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild. (Ch.1)

My ex-girlfriend was very sexy. She reminded me of the Sphinx because she was very mysterious and eternal and solid...and her nose was shot off by French soldiers.

But Shakespeare knows what the sphinx thinks, if anybody does. His genius is penetrative as cold midwinter entering every room, and making warmth shiver in ague fits. I think Shakespeare never errs in his logical sequence in character. He surprises us, seems unnatural to us, but because we have been superficial observers; while genius will disclose those truths to which we are blind.

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building.

This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home.

Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the mystery and tears of things so that the commonest object, the most familiar face- even my own- become ghostly, unreal, enigmatic. I get into an attitude of almost total scepticism, nescience, solipsism, in a world of dumb, sphinx-like things that cannot explain themselves. The discovery of how I am situated- a sentient being on a globe in space overshadows me. I wish I were just nothing.

A major difficulty is that the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx is partly a product of the answers that we already have given to the riddle in its various forms.

I never saw a pyramid, but I've seen photographs; I know what a pyramid or a sphinx looks like. There are pictures that do that, but they satisfy a different kind of interest.

A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of laughter more terrible than any sadness-a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.

The Sphinx-riddle. Solve it, or be torn to bits, is the decree.

There is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato's secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no 'Bible,' nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic - but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life - a Greek life which he repudiated - without an Aristophanes!

READING, n. The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in "dialect" and humor in slang.

The problem of Eternity, of which the face of the Sphinx speaks, takes us into the realm of the impossible. Even the problem of Time is simple in comparison with the problem of Eternity.

It is of first-class importance that our answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx should be in step with how we conduct our civilisation, and this should in turn be in step with the actual workings of living systems.

Drowsing, they take the noble attitude of a great sphinx, who, in a desert land, sleeps always, dreaming dreams that have no end.

Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.

I have found a shaft, going 29 meters [95 feet, approximately] vertically down into the ground, exactly halfway between the Chefren Pyramid and the Sphinx. At the bottom, which was filled with water, we have found a burial chamber with four pillars. In the middle is a large granite sarcophagus which I expect to be the grave of Osiris, the god.

On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw, A Buddha, hand at rest, Hand lifted up that blest; And right between these two a girl at play That, it may be, had danced her life away.

If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist.

The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

For I am I: ergo, the truth of myself; my own sphinx, conflict, chaos, vortex—asymmetric to all rhythms, oblique to all paths. I am the prism between black and white: mine own unison in duality.

When the Amherst sphinx styled herself a pagan, she meant she didn't believe in the biblical God. What sort of deity, if any, she did believe in is hard to pinpoint.

We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal high road of respectability and duty, and then complain of those ways being so intricate and so dark. We stand bewildered before the mystery of our own making, and the riddles of life that we will not solve, and then accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us.

Are there any mythical beasts which aren't simple pastiches of nature? Centaurs, minotaurs, unicorns, griffons, chimeras, sphinxes, manticores, and the like don't speak well for the human imagination. None is as novel as a kangaroo or starfish.

Las Vegas has become a child's picture-book dream of a city -- here a storybook castle, there a sphinx-flanked black pyramid beaming white light into the darkness as a landing beam for UFOs, and everywhere neon oracles and twisting screens predict happiness and good fortune, announce singers and comedians and magicians in residence or on their way, and the lights always flash and beckon and call.

Virginia," Billy said urgently. "Don't do this." "Shut up,Billy." "Think of the people in San Francisco." "I don't know any of the people in San Francisco," Virginia answered, then paused. "Well,actually I do,and I don't like them. But I do like you,Billy, and I'm not going to allow you to end up as lunch for some raggedy lion-monster-thingy." "A sphinx," Machiavelli corrected her. He was standing at the bars again. "Mistress Dare," the Italian said carefully. "I absolutely applaud you for what you want to do for your friend. But I urge you to think of the bigger picture.

What is the little one thinking about? Very wonderful things, no doubt; Unwritten history! Unfathomed mystery! Yet he laughs and cries, and eats and drinks, And chuckles and crows, and nods and winks, As if his head were as full of kinks And curious riddles as any sphinx!

Creamy and leggy, with long azure hair and the eyes of a silent-movie star, she moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.

She moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.

Courage~ What makes the flag on the mast to wave? What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage! What makes the sphinx the seventh wonder? Courage! What makes the dawn come up like thunder? Courage! What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the "ape" in apricot?~Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz

It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.

The population question is the real riddle of the sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication, all other riddle sink into insignificance.

Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.

what sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination

Experience has taught me a technique for dealing with such people [...] I counter the devotees of the Great Pyramid by adoration of the Sphinx; and the devotee of nuts by pointing out that hazelnuts and walnuts are as deleterious as other foods and only Brazil nuts should be tolerated. But when I was younger I had not yet acquired this technique, with the result that my contacts with cranks were sometimes alarming.

Every period of time is a sphinx that throws itself into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved.