"Sphinx" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... colour of some of the species might be phytophagic—that is, due to the direct action of the differently coloured leaves on which the insect fed. Mr. Poulton's experiments have thrown much light on this question, since he has conclusively proved that, in the case of the sphinx caterpillar of Smerinthus ocellatus, the change of colour is not due to the food but to the coloured ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... his cell he pointed out with his finger the immense church of Notre-Dame, which, outlining against the starry sky the black silhouette of its two towers, its stone flanks, its monstrous haunches, seemed an enormous two-headed sphinx, seated in the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... heel, and made his way slowly around the corner of the passage into the other part of the building, and paused at the open doorway of the Honourable Hilary's outer office. By the street windows sat the Honourable Brush Bascom, sphinx-like, absorbing wisdom and clouds of cigar smoke which emanated from the Honourable ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... pause to admire the "Sphinx" by Elihu Vedder, "The Misses Boit" by Sargent, Winslow Homer's "Fog Warning," John W. Alexander's "Isabella and the Pot of Basil." This last picture we love not only as a work of art but because it is the subject of one of Keat's ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... which influenced Hawthorne's life. I heard people speaking of it as the profile of an "old man," but to Jack's eyes and mine it was young with eternal youth, the youth of the gods. It gave us the same mysterious thrill that the Sphinx gives; and its gaze, reading what sky and mountains, cathedral forests and rushing rivers have to tell, holds the same Secret that's in the stone ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... the Pyramids more wondrous and more awful than all else in the land of Egypt, there sits the lonely Sphinx. Comely the creature is, but the comeliness is not of this world. The once worshipped beast is a deformity and a monster to this generation; and yet you can see that those lips, so thick and heavy, were fashioned according to some ancient mould of beauty—some ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... plus, matire vivante! Qu'un granit entour d'une vague pouvante, Assoupi dans le fond d'un Saharau brumeux! Un vieux sphinx ignor du monde insoucieux, Oubli sur la carte, et dont l'humeur farouche Ne chante qu'aux rayons du ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... heart, even in the history of a race, may be worth infinitely more than the human intellect, and that it will sooner or later prove itself infinitely better able to answer all the cruel enigmas of the Sphinx of Life. I still believe that the old Japanese were nearer to the solution of those enigmas than are we, just because they recognized moral beauty as greater than intellectual beauty. And, by way of conclusion, I ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... brief acquaintance. There were depths in Rolph's nature which were never fathomed by those nearest and dearest to him—possibly not even by himself. Mackenzie seems to have long regarded Rolph with a sort of distant awe—as a Sphinx, close, oracular, inscrutable. Rolph evidently estimated Mackenzie correctly, as one whose politics were founded upon deeply-rooted convictions, and not upon mere opinions, although he would probably have found it difficult to subject ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... had hitherto proved so inexpressibly unproductive! The secret of Man's Being is still like the Sphinx's secret: a riddle that he cannot rede; and for ignorance of which he suffers death, the worst death, a spiritual. What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words. High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... You're a regular sphinx sometimes. Peter says that you even disconcert him at times, when you take to remembering things out of ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from this oracular role. By amateurs in philosophy and professionals alike, the universe is represented as a queer sort of petrified sphinx whose appeal to man consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining powers. THE Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind! I read in an old letter—from a gifted friend who died too young—these words: "In everything, in science, art, morals and religion, there ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... in the shop windows here with my name under them, I have been in wondering admiration at the boundless loving-kindness of my English and Scottish friends in keeping up such a warm heart for such a Gorgon. I should think that the Sphinx in the London Museum might have sat for most of them. I am going to make a collection of these portraits to bring home to you. There is a great variety of them, and they will be useful, like the Irishman's guide-board, which showed where the ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... almost blood-curdling. It seems to come from all directions and distance out of measure! Vibrating over the sands and through the rocks, filling the immense void, crying out as it were for the sphinx, a veritable de profundis of the wastes. The vultures, who hold the fort during the day have given way to the night shift, the jackals. These come from all directions; from the caves in the earth, from among the rocks, from here, there, ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... extract from an article[24] from the pen of that accomplished scholar, and well-known enthusiast in bee-culture, Henry K. Oliver, Esq. "We add a few words respecting the enemies of bees. The mouse, the toad, the ant, the stouter spiders, the wasp, the death-head moth, (Sphinx atropos,) and all the varieties of gallinaceous birds, have, each and all, "a sweet tooth," and like, very well, a dinner of raw bee. But the ravages of all these are but a baby bite to the destruction caused by the bee-moth, (Tinea mellonella.) ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... Floatin' Goddess. Just about to commence! This way for the Mystic Gallery—three Illusions for threepence! Atalanta, the Silver Queen of the Moon; the Oriental Beauty in the Table of the Sphinx, and the Wonderful Galatea, or Pygmalion's Dream. Only threepence! This way for the Mystic Marvel o' She! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 25, 1890 • Various
... hero but presents a heroine. And to begin with at least, novels were written for the reading of heroines. Miss Lydia Languish sets no great store upon the contents of a man's head. That is just the stuffing of the doll. Eyes and heart are her game. And so there is never any more sphinx in the story than a lady may impersonate. And as inevitably the heroine meets a man. In his own first success, White reflected, the hero, before he had gone a dozen pages, met a very pleasant young woman very pleasantly in ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... and misunderstood husband, and she is disposed to take him under her wing, and defend him on all occasions against us. He never speaks to her; he is at all times a man of few words, but, as far as Minora is concerned, he might have no tongue at all, and sits sphinx-like and impenetrable while she takes us to task about some remark of a profane nature that we may have addressed to him. One night, some days after her arrival, she developed a skittishness of manner which has since disappeared, and tried to be playful with him; but you might as well ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... your childish fancy meets, Of Thibet's dogs, or China's paroquets; Though apes, asps, lizards, things without a tail, And all the tribes of foreign monsters fail; Here shall ye sigh to see, with rust o'ergrown, The iron griffin and the sphinx of stone; And mourn, neglected in their waste abodes, Fire-breathing ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... care for him—despite your life-long reserve and apparent indifference? I have suspected as much, several times, but that imperturbable sphinx-face of yours always baffled me. My child, you need not droop your head; he is worthy of your love; he is the only man I know whom I would gladly see you marry. Irene, look up—tell me—did Leonard know this? Conscious of your affection ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... awkward silence. Dillon knew they had been talking about him. Beneath the deep gold of his blond skin Hollister flushed. Boy though he was, Dud usually had the self-possession of the Sphinx. But momentarily he ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... within the furs again, after she had ascertained that the two tears were not going to run down her cheeks. Her large face wore the expression of a coloured sphinx, and there was something Egyptian about the immobility of her eyes and her painted eyebrows. No one could have guessed from her look whether she were going to cry or laugh the next time she spoke. Lushington walked up and down the room without ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... shook his head sadly, 'I shall never understand human nature; there is always an abyss below an abyss, and the firmest seeming ground is usually quagmire when you come to step on it. George Pendle is a riddle which would puzzle the Sphinx. Hum! hum! another fabulous beast. Well, well, I can only wait and watch until I discover the truth, and then—well, what then?—why, nothing!' And Graham, having talked himself into a cul-de-sac of thought, shook his head furiously and strove to dismiss the matter from ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... just how much MacGregor knew, and he sat down to bring up before him for the thousandth time a vision of the two faces that had played their part in his life—the face of the girl at home, as beautiful as a Diane de Poitiers, as soulless as a sphinx, who had offered herself to him in return for his name and millions, and of that other which he had met away up in the frozen barrens of Lac Bain. Beauty-proof! He laughed and loaded his pipe. MacGregor had made a good guess, even though he did not know what had passed that ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... said Billy, in vigorous Arabic, and the little boy answered proudly, in most excellent English, "I am a messenger, sir. I am the boy who held the canoe that night. Buy a postcard, sir? Only six piastres a dozen, six piastres, Views of Egypt, the Sphinx, the Nile, the——" ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... fiends had decided it between them, and they had put their idea into execution for one whole week. Marguerite looked at Chauvelin as she would on some monstrous, inscrutable Sphinx, marveling if God—even in His anger—could really have created such a fiendish brain, or, having created it, could allow it to ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... do I want?' he asked himself, while his heart was heavy. He once gave her a ring with a sphinx ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... amiable willingness that she should take her leave without shaking more dust from her feet upon an already burdened household, had become impatient desire by the time I counted out her wages. Yet, here she stands, grim as the sphinx, fixed as Fate, with the inexorable requisition, ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... as picturesque and malignantly savage as those with which he had cursed the tules; and suddenly they stopped, checked by the Chinaman's expression. It was neither angry or alarmed, but intently observant, the eyes unblinking—an imperturbable, sphinx-like face against which the flood of ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... Wilson before venturing upon such a statement. But then it was necessary to have a word to rhyme with "view," and what could be easier than to make a white egg "blue"? Again, one of our later poets has evidently confounded the hummingbird with that curious parody upon it, the hawk or sphinx moth, as in his poem upon the subject he has hit off exactly the habits of the moth, or, rather, his creature seems a cross between the moth and the bird, as it has the habits of the one and the plumage of the other. The time to see the hummingbird, he says, is after sunset in the ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... silverware, of tapestries which peopled the walls with antique figures and strange birds in fairy forests; she dreamed of delicious viands served in wonderful dishes, of whispered gallantries heard with a sphinx-like smile as you eat the pink flesh of a trout or the ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... starting up, 'Speak swiftly, ere too late, where dwelleth he?' 'Ah, that I know not,' spake the little voice, 'Yet keep thy courage, seek thou out the stork, The ancient stork that saw from earliest days, Sitting in primal contemplation lost, Sphinx-like, seraphic, and oracular, Watching the strange ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... the strange girl without taking the hint to retire. Somehow, she could not rid herself of the impression that whether or not she was mistaken in supposing Eliza to be the missing Lucy, she had stumbled upon a sphinx whose riddle was well ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... men, leaning over backward to be neutral, were pro- Ally, including some with German names. But publicly you could hardly get an admission out of them that there was any war. As for Harvard, 1914, hang a passport carrier around the Sphinx's neck and you have him done ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... discipline is of the severest. They are therefore among the most fearless fighters in the world, and always put in a tight place on the French front. There is one man at the enlisting depot[9] who is a wonderful being, and can size up a new recruit at a glance. He is known as "Le Sphinx." You must give him your real name and reason for joining the Legion, and in exchange he gives you a number by which henceforth you are known. He knows the secrets of all the Legion, and they are never ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... could distinctly trace the bold contour of the upper heights tipped by the central haystack, El Nublo, a giant trachytic monolith. We passed Confital Bay, whose 'comfits' are galettes of stone, and gave a wide berth to the Isleta and its Sphinx's head. This rocky peninsula, projecting sharply from the north-eastern chord of the circle, is outlined by a dangerous reef, and drops suddenly into 130 fathoms. Supported on the north by great columns of basalt, it is the terminus of a secondary chain, trending north-east—south-west, ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... different sources, the factors capable of acting on the minds of crowds may differ considerably. It is necessary, then, to study them separately. This is not a useless study. 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 ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... not God, if the only God to whom you can go is the God of nature, then you might as well fall down in the sand at the base of the far Egyptian sphinx, open your eyes for a moment to the blue sky that spreads away to the horizon before its staring face, its cold, chiselled, inscrutable smile, and the next moment shut your eyes against the pelting dust the idle winds ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... hand a slender staff of bright metal like polished steel. But the face! it was that which inspired my awe and my terror. It was the face of man, but yet of a type of man distinct from our known extant races. The nearest approach to it in outline and expression is the face of the sculptured sphinx—so regular in its calm, intellectual, mysterious beauty. Its colour was peculiar, more like that of the red man than any other variety of our species, and yet different from it—a richer and a softer hue, with large black ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... show mercy to Hellas, later they may show justice to me. The war is far from ended. Can you not let me serve on some ship of the allies where none can recognize me? Thus let me wait a year, and trust that in that year the sphinx will ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... reference to Fitz James Stephen; let me end by a quotation from him. "What do you think {31} of yourself? What do you think of the world?... These are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we must deal with them.... In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark.... If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... is not seen. You rob the robbers, and strive to circumvent the men who make a mock at all other citizens. It is only by a sort of sleight of hand that you can throw your nets around robbers; for it is easier to guess the riddles of the Sphinx than to detect the whereabouts of a flying thief. He looks round him on all sides, ready to start off at the sound of an advancing footstep, trembling at the thought of a possible ambush. How can one catch him who, like the wind, tarries never in one place? Go forth, ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... of his horse. His comrades in that ghostly domain were invisible and inaudible. These were conditions favorable to thought, and he was thinking. Of the nature of his thoughts his clear-cut handsome features yielded no attesting sign. His face was as inscrutable as that of the sphinx. Why should it have made a record which there was none to observe? At the sound of a footstep he merely turned his eyes in the direction whence it came; one of his sergeants, looking a giant in stature in the false perspective of the fog, approached, and when clearly defined and reduced ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... his hail and returned its own sphinx-like reply. Martin stuffed the pouch into his pocket. He was distinctly uneasy, now, on the hunchback's account. Something had happened, he felt—some accident had happened to Little Billy. It was not like Little Billy to thus forsake his beloved shag, his constant ally in his fight against ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... the grim sphinx clock on the black marble chimneypiece, as it remorselessly ticked away his last few moments of home-life, and he ingeniously set himself to crown his sorrow by reviving recollections of ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... beldame's glittering eye held his horse motionless. 'Good woman,' cried Hind, flinging her a crown, 'I am in haste; pray let me pass.' 'Sir,' answered the witch, 'three days I have awaited your coming. Would you have me lose my labour now?' And with Hind's assent the sphinx delivered her message: 'Captain Hind,' said she, 'your life is beset with constant danger, and since from your birth I have wished you well, my poor skill has devised a perfect safeguard.' With this she gave ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... having had her perfect work, they metaphorically came out of their shells and permitted an inspection. Above the railway I saw one of the few birds of my entire Rocky Mountain outing that I was unable to identify. That little feathered Sphinx—what could he have been? To quote from my note-book, "His song, as he sits quietly on a twig in a pine tree, is a rich gurgling trill, slightly like that of a house-wren, but fuller and more melodious, with an air ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... contrast, by scores of arc lamps. At that distance and in that confused tangle of light and shadow the great timbers of the frame looked spidery. The effect was that of a luminous crown upon a gigantic, sphinx-like head. ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... through the chimney, for it had the same forceful existence to him as anything in life. Ah Ben, seeing that he was still puzzling himself over the problem of mind and matter, the puzzle of life, the great sphinx ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... vivid beauty and plenitude of her maidenhood, it would have been just the same. Elodie Figasso had never sold herself. No. All that side of things was out of the question. She wished, however, that he was less of an enigmatic, though kindly, sphinx. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... SPHINX.—This denotes that your hopes will be set on things far beyond your reach, and that as nothing but the very best in life has any attraction for you, it is improbable that you will ever attain to ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... comment, but sat in front of him, unresponsive as the sphinx. The rigor of her flat back told him that, though she might have to keep his shameful secret for the sake of her own, he could not presume upon it ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... twins had heard it, and were just in time to catch from Julian and the general a last glare of scorn as the group of five left the cabin. Then again came silence, except behind the footlights, where the sphinx-like singer bore straight on through the refrain and came to the new lines. Sing them out, sphinx; the more senseless ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... as a marble statue, shut up in your room, and fifteen minutes after, she vanishes as mysteriously as a fairy in a nursery legend. And, lastly, she turns up in the shape of a court-page, and swaggers along London Bridge at this hour of the night, chanting a love song. Faith! it would puzzle the sphinx herself to read this riddle, ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... the English (Lord Lyons) is the most sphinx; he is taciturn, reserved, listens more than he speaks; the others are ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... monster which the world ne'er saw," but inscrutable as the Sphinx, whom it were vain, or worse, to question of the whence and whither. Under the other, the perfection of Nature, if relative, is multifarious and ever renewed; and much that is enigmatical now may find explanation in some record ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... dominated by vast inaccessible ridges. Leaving the so-aptly named "Dead Man's Gully" on the left, you look up to the "Sphinx," that perfect position of the sniper, climb to "Battleship Hill," and then to Chunuk Bair. In an hour or so you may walk all the way we ever got. And we did not need to have got much further than Chunuk Bair. Down below on the one hand is ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... what I mentioned to you as having been since proposed to me, and what I was so near being compelled to accept. There is, however, still one contingency, which may prevent this from taking place: I think it not a probable one. I am obliged to write a little in the Sphinx style, but on Thursday I will speak more openly. I could not, however, resist the desire of taking the first moment to tell you, generally, the ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... a charming little Branch of Civilisation at the gate of the desert, stands, like man himself, in the shadow of two terrible immensities, the Sphinx and the Pyramid, the Origin and the End. And in the grill-room, over a glass of whiskey and soda, we presume to solve in few words the eternal mystery. But that is not what we came for. And to avoid the bewildering depths into which we were led, we suggested a stroll on the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... intense bitterness in his tone. Truly this man, with his lightning changes from boorish incivility to whole-hearted hospitality, from apparently impenetrable reserve to an almost desperate outspokenness, was as incomprehensible as any sphinx. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... woman in Paris, or in the universe, who naturally pleased him most. He entertained for her, at once, the interest which attaches to forbidden fruit, to the attraction of strange beauty, and to the mystery of an impenetrable sphinx. She was, at this time, more goddess-like than ever. The immense fortune of her husband, and the adulation which it brought her, had placed her on a golden car. On this she seated herself with a gracious and native majesty, as if ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... a few miles from a west-east to a north-south rhumb, and forms a bay within a bay. The larger is bounded north by Akromasi Point, the southern wall of the great stream; the bold foreland outlain with reefs and a rock like a headless sphinx, is known from afar, east and west, by its 'one tree,' a palm apparently double, the leader of a straggling row. On the south of the greater bay is Point Pepre, by the natives called Inkubun, or Cocoanut-Tree, from a neighbouring village; like the Akromasi foreland, ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... little tables placed by the columns which uphold the roof; they are of all ages, of all types; plain, pretty, commonplace, beautiful; and ten, perhaps, are lovely. The gipsies are disappointing, not so comely as the pure Spaniards; and they attract only by the sphinx-like mystery of their copper-coloured skin, by their ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... repeated by the sculptors of Egypt was the Sphinx. The colossal and most famous one (Fig. 5) is not far from the great pyramid, and has the form of a recumbent lion with a human head. It is one hundred and seventy-two feet long, and is the Sphinx of the world; but there were great numbers of these strange figures in Egypt—in some cases ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... She had admitted everything already, and she had intended to be a very sphinx with ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... unreadable, unmoved, narrowed eyes, closed lips, slightly flushed face, as if carved six thousand years ago in order to fix for ever that something secret and obscure which is in all women. Not the gross immobility of a Sphinx proposing roadside riddles but the finer immobility, almost sacred, of a fateful figure seated at the very source of the passions that have moved men from the ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... the Desert of Sahara there stands the world-famous Sphinx with its inscrutable face turned toward the East, ever greeting the sun as its rising rays herald the newborn day. It was said in the Greek myth that it was the wont of this monster to ask a riddle of each traveler. She ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... English Poets" confesses that he knows nothing of him save "some beautiful verses to his wife, dissuading her from accompanying him on his travels abroad (see p. 318), and some quaint riddles in verse, which the Sphinx could not unravel." ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... is a most extraordinary man," said John J. Ingalls, speaking of Grover Cleveland. "While the Senate was in session to induct Hendricks into office, I had an opportunity to study Cleveland, as he sat there like a sphinx. He occupied a seat immediately in front of the vice-president's stand, and from where I sat, I had an unobstructed view ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... "Behold! The Sphinx is Africa. The bond Of Silence is upon her. Old And white with tombs, and rent and shorn; With raiment wet with tears and torn, And trampled on, yet ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... the Sphinx and does not harm her. They say that he does not dare to harm the Sphinx. She has borne him many ...
— Plays of Gods and Men • Lord Dunsany
... drinking the waters, for complaints much of the same kind as yours, I mean pains in my legs, hips, and arms: whether gouty or rheumatic, God knows; but, I believe, both, that fight without a decision in favor of either, and have absolutely reduced me to the miserable situation of the Sphinx's riddle, to walk upon three legs; that is, with the assistance of my stick, to walk, or rather hobble, very indifferently. I wish it were a declared gout, which is the distemper of a gentleman; whereas the rheumatism ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... sedate and sober-eyed, Shall wear the ermined robe at Taney's side; And he, the stripling, smooth of face and slight, Whose slender form scarce intercepts the light, Shall rule the Bench where Parsons gave the law, And sphinx-like sat uncouth, majestic Shaw Ah, many a star has shed its fatal ray On names we loved—our ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... not at least questioned him about the hints she had gathered on the way. He did not know the two ladies next to her, he did not even, as it chanced, know Mrs. Lorin Boulger; but he knew New York, and New York was the sphinx whose riddle she must ...
— Autres Temps... - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... bad news. Marjorie's desire to cry left her. She leaned back in her seat and assumed an air of indifference far removed from her real state of mind. Then she calmly refolded the letter and placed it in its envelope with the impassivity of a young sphinx. ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... was a door, the entrance to the Egyptian temple. It was square and heavy-browed, flanked by short thick columns rising from a base of sculptured papyrus-leaves, and flowering in lotus capitals. Three marble steps led to the threshold, while on either side reclined a sphinx in polished granite, softened, however, by a delicate flowering vine, which had been trained to cling round their necks. On the deep panels of the door were mystic emblems carved in relief. A line of hieroglyphics inscribed ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... a glance at Hugh Ingelow, but the sphinx was never more unreadable than he. He caught her ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... Henrietta, 'when he's buried like a delicate Sphinx up to his shoulders in the sands of your good opinion, and the mummy cloths of his own conceit; but just remove these, and you'll see a downfall. My dear FRANCESCA, this man is your CECCO, and he'd far better retire into a monastery than hope ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... I said, "the precipitous sides of that high rock! Shall I ever forget it, beginning like the tail of a lion and rising up to the sky, towering above the level landscape like a sphinx." ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... howling round a man; who has to stand silent the while; and scan, wisely under pain of death, the altogether inarticulate, dumb and inexorable matter which the gods call Fact! Friedrich did read his terrible Sphinx-riddle; the Gazetteer tornado did pipe and blow. King Friedrich, in contrast with his Environment at that time, will most likely never be portrayed to modern men in his real proportions, real aspect and attitude then and there,—which are silently ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... it proved to be a negro. He tied his boat and deliberately unloaded his supply of vegetables. His stolid, sphinx-like face showed ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... "What will you do with us, we hundreds of millions, who cannot keep pace with you?" If the New Republic emerges at all it will emerge by grappling with this riddle; it must come into existence by the passes this Sphinx will guard. Moreover, the necessary results of the reaction of irresponsible wealth upon that infirm and dangerous thing the human will, the spreading moral rot of gambling which is associated with irresponsible ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... silence for several minutes over the cigars and whiskey before Grim opened fire at last. He talked straight out in front of Mrs. Davey, for she had mothered Cosmopolitan Oil men in a hundred out-of-the-way places. She knew more sacred secrets than the Sphinx. ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... those days; she loved. She moved as one who is moved; she was drawn as by the cords of the sun. The Ancient One, the Sphinx, had her fast. The reflection of a greater thing claimed her and taught her, held her like a bayadere ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... on the desert... and meet these cacti is like whispering into the ear of the Sphinx, and listening at her locked lips,... and to go out in April and see them suddenly abloom is as though the lips of the Sphinx should part and utter solemn words. A bunch of white flowers at the tip of the obelisk, flowers springing ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... they were steeped in the beauty and mystery of the ships. Then they talked of what they would do when they were grown up—where they would travel—the far, fair shores they would see. Nan and Di meant to go to Europe. Walter longed for the Nile moaning past its Egyptian sands, and a glimpse of the sphinx. Faith opined rather dismally that she supposed she would have to be a missionary—old Mrs. Taylor told her she ought to be—and then she would at least see India or China, those mysterious lands of the Orient. ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... us, Jack! you are enough to startle the sphinx. Come out from under that table at once," commanded ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... fine gold. Anon, as the whim caught him, he would pile it up and hedge it with great silver pins, fan-shape, such as country girls use, till it took the semblance, now of a tower, now of a wheel, now of some winged beast—sphinx or basilisk—couching on the girl's head. Then, stepping back a little, he would clasp his hands over his eyes, and with head in air sing some snatch of triumph, or laugh aloud for the very wildness of his power; and so the game went on, that seemed a feast of delight to the ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... continued; "because I do not feel a bit as if I were being introduced to a stranger, but as if I were meeting an old friend. I have so much to tell you about all that has happened to me since you and I played together in the shadow of the Sphinx, or worshipped together in the temple at Philae; and you will be interested in it all, ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... summer to her trim back-yard that looks like a picture in a seed catalogue, and, like a faithful spouse, declines to leave it or Josephus for more than a few days. Josephus is a large, sleek, black cat, a fence-top sphinx, who sits all day in summer wearing a silver collar, watching the sparrows and the neighbourhood's wash with impartial interest, while at night he goes on excursions of his own to a stable down a crooked street in "Greenwich Village," where they still keep pigeons. Some day ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... a moment with a light which she did not understand. His smile was tolerant, even genial, but his face remained like the face of a sphinx. ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was one of those beautiful, brilliant enigmas, who irresistibly allure everyone like a Sphinx, for she was young, charming, and singularly lovely, and understood how to heighten her charms not a little by carefully-chosen dresses. She was a great lady of the right stamp, and was very intellectual into the bargain, which is not the case with ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... blood to be driven an inch, and no one tried to drive him. In his own home he was a spectre of gnawing anguish to his mother and Margaret, of unspeakable bitterness and disappointment to his father, and an impenetrable sphinx to Dan. For in Dan there was no shaking doubt. He was the spirit, incarnate, of the young, unquestioning, unthinking, ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... purposely causes this to be, that in the end Man may be compelled to look for the Spirit within himself—the only place where he can come in touch with it. This, we think, is the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx—"Look Within for that which ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... attention of the artists of the early Renaissance; and while they studied, copied, and calculated, another thought began to haunt them, another eager desire began to pursue them: by the side of Nature, the manifold, the baffling, the bewildering, there rose up before them another divinity, another sphinx, mysterious in its ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... farewell Father Nile, Impenetrable Sphinx, eternal pile Of broad-based pyramid, and ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... immediately made myself known, seeing that my regiment consisted of Lady Warrington, our infant, whom she was nursing, and three negro servants, received us at first with a very grim welcome. But Captain Horner of the Sphinx frigate, who had been on the Jamaica station, and received, like all the rest of the world, many kindnesses from our dear Governor there, when he heard that my wife was General Lambert's daughter, eagerly received her on board, and gave up his best cabin ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... arms and feet bare; in the right hand he holds a lily all in blossom; the left hand is extended in rigid gesture of warning. Brown-gold hair grows thick about the angel's neck; the shadowed profile is outlined against the hard, sad sky; the expression of the face is deep and sphinx-like; he has come, it is clear, from vast realms of light, where uncertainty and doubt are unknown. The Dove passes by him towards the Virgin. Look upon her again, crouching in her white bed, her knees drawn to her bosom, her deep blue ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... happy until he is in his grave," were the words of Solon. Here was a strong fresh proof of their truth. Every corpse is a sphinx of immortality. The sphinx in this sarcophagus might unveil its own mystery in the words which the living had himself ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... sphinx unguessed, enthroned in azure skies, White as the swan, my heart is cold as snow; No hated motion breaks my lines' pure flow, Nor tears nor laughter ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... tell it, stars already close at hand, secure from every obstacle and from every hindrance, to give to us a time in which a Five hundred, Ten, and Five sent by God[6] shall slay the thievish woman[7] and that giant who with her is delinquent. And perchance my narration, dark as Themis and the Sphinx,[8] less persuades thee, because after their fashion it clouds the understanding. But soon the facts will be the Naiades[9] that shall solve this difficult enigma, without harm of flocks or of harvest. Do thou ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... was, with which she surrounded herself, exalted her in the estimation of the duke. She became in that little chamber where she was simply Mademoiselle Robert, a hundred times more charming and attractive to him than any problem: a veritable Parisian sphinx. ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... weeks. We're quite pals! I'm for playing the luck every time! When the jewels showed up to-day, I figured that to-night's the night—see? Cloran and I are going to supper together at the Silver Sphinx at about eleven o'clock—and this is where you shed the Gypsy Nan stuff, and show up as your own sweet self. Cloran'll ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... rests content under a mystery,' he said; 'and you have proved my good angel, so I can only avow my gratitude. But do you know that from a boy I have viewed that cupboard as impenetrable as the sphinx itself? And yet my energy or ambition to solve its secret was never sufficient to allow me to succeed. My father always told me that age had some advantages, and that when the time came for me to know all that he did, I ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... mortals may kid ourselves into thinking he did or did not know, or what we may think he ought to have known, he began operations as soon as the skua came alongside, so to speak—that is, drifted against the particular bowlder upon which the sphinx-like herring-gull happened by chance—always by ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... horror has always been secretly felt by man; it was felt even under pagan forms of religion, which offered a very feeble, and also a very limited gamut for giving expression to the human capacities of sublimity or of horror. We read it in the fearful composition of the sphinx. The dragon, again, is the snake inoculated upon the scorpion. The basilisk unites the mysterious malice of the evil eye, unintentional on the part of the unhappy agent, with the intentional venom of some other malignant ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... which he stood; by accident, or by design, his appetite conformed to potent and permanent forces; and, wherein it did not, he was, in spite of Wolsey's remark, content to forgo its gratification. It was not he, but the Reformation, which put the kingdoms of Europe to the hazard. The Sphinx propounded her riddle to all nations alike, and all were required to answer. Should they cleave to the old, or should they embrace the new? Some pressed forward, others held back, and some, to their own confusion, replied in dubious ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... find the earth can look so good, and behave so handsomely, on the quiet, to a vagabond traveller like Thoreau, who has no valid excuse for not being at honest work, as though it reserved its finest mornings to show to favoured children when really good people are not about. The Sphinx has a secret only for those who do not see ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... probings, who knows more of the human heart to-day than the old Psalmist? And what is the problem of government but one of human nature? What Burbank has as yet made grapes to grow on thorns or figs on thistles? The riddle of the universe is no nearer solution than it was when the Sphinx first looked upon the Nile. The one constant and inconstant quantity with which man must deal is man. Human nature responds so far as we can see to the same magnetic pull and push that moved it in the days of Abraham and of Socrates. The foundation of government is man—changing, inert, ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... fortune, looked down as of yore, snarling, and with whiskers stiffened to indicate that if he had been given hind legs, they would be ready for a spring. So worn was the gargoyle that ears and chin and part of forehead had disappeared. But you can see the snarl just as you can see the Sphinx's smile. When a thing is well done, it is done for all time. If a poor workman had fashioned that gargoyle, there would have been no panther and no snarl when it was put up there. But a master worked the stone, and what he wrought is ineradicable. It will disappear only with the stone itself. ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... elsewhere, hinting at the presence there, once, of sacred groves. The idols are immense, their faces are vague; the storms and the suns and the rains of the ages have cast over them a veil. The sphinx is understandable and a toy compared to these things, some of which have a stature of fifty feet, whose creation is veiled in absolute mystery—the gods of a people for ever and ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... songs mark the greatness and the waning of the heroic world In the Nibelungen-lied the final event is a great calamity that is akin to a half historical event of the North. Odin descends to the nether world to consult Hela; but she, like the sphinx of Thebes, will not reply save in an enigma, which enigma is to entail terrible tragedies, and lead to destruction the young hero who is the prey of ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... some new circumstance gave rise to a new hypothesis. Unconscious of all these inquiries and fictions, Maurice Kirkwood lived on in his inoffensive and unexplained solitude, and seemed likely to remain an unsolved enigma. The "Sachem" of the boating girls became the "Sphinx" of the village ramblers, and it was agreed on all hands that Egypt did not hold any hieroglyphics harder to make out than the meaning of this young ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... see the handsome girl rather than her sculpture, in order to be able to say at the club in the evening, "I was at Felicia's to-day." Among them was Paul de Gery, silent, absorbed in an admiration which each day sunk into his heart a little more deeply, trying to understand the beautiful sphinx draped in purple cashmere and ecru lace, who worked away bravely amid her clay, a burnisher's apron reaching nearly to her neck, allowing her small, proud head to emerge with those transparent tones, those gleams of veiled radiance of which the sense, the inspiration bring the blood to the ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... the coast lights were slipping past, making golden paths on the black water as our tug pulled us out to sea. The reservists down below were singing "Va fuori, o stranier!" I dropped my package overboard, watched it vanish, and turned to behold the sphinx-like Van Blarcom, sprung up as if by magic, regarding me placidly from the ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... a fairly correct idea of what the white people of the country think of them, for that opinion has for a long time been and is still being constantly stated; but they are themselves more or less a sphinx to the whites. It is curiously interesting and even vitally important to know what are the thoughts of ten millions of them concerning the people among whom they live. In these pages it is as though a veil had been drawn aside: the reader ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... it. She heard him moving to and fro, and knew his burdens—the poor, little burdens he bore. When she entered, he was alone in the room. The grim switchboard flashed its metallic face in cryptic, sphinx-like immobility. She seated herself on a stool and donned the bright earpiece. She looked at the mouthpiece. She had never looked at one so closely before. It was wide and black, pimpled with usage; inert; ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... the clouds obscure thy face! The breath of Typhon devours the pyramids. Just now I have seen the Sphinx fly away. He ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... incomprehensible! They must know we're here. Been waiting fifteen minutes now, begad! Getting beyond a joke—deuced exasperating, Perry, y' know. Dammit, man, why can't you say something, do something, instead of sitting there so devilish calm and serene, staring before you like an infernal sphinx?" ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... General, somewhat drawling on the words, 'you exchanged cards and confidences?' Polson stretched out his hands again in appeal, and the General, looking at him with a countenance impassive as the Sphinx, felt a pang of pity in his heart, for the lad was a good lad, and the old warrior knew it, and he had been near to loving him, this past half-dozen years. And the boy was not merely pale with the suffering of his mind, but his very ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... Therefore Saladin, the great Saracen warrior, simply stripped the Pyramids to build a military fortress on the heights of Cairo. It is a little difficult to define exactly what is a man's duty to the Sphinx; and therefore the Mamelukes used it entirely as a target. There was little in them of that double feeling, full of pathos and irony, which divided the hearts of the primitive Christians in presence of the great ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... a sphinx as he looks!" Her tone betrayed a slight pique—"Now, your character would be much harder to read. ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... that is full of energy. But there were times when I used to stand at a distance and gaze at his peaceful aspect, and wonder if he would ever open the floodgates of fun in a game of romp on any rainy Sunday of the future. If a traveler caught the Sphinx humming to herself, would he not be inclined to sit down and watch her till she did ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... of things that they are not," said Hadria, "especially to men. A poor benighted man might as well try to get on to confidential terms with the Sphinx, as to learn the real thoughts and wishes ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... to it, however, Ivan was unable to control himself, and once more gave way to a fit of involuntary laughter. The head of the old guardsman, standing up like a sphinx above the frozen surface,—his grizzled hair powdered all over with snow like the poll of some grand flunkey,—his long moustache loaded with it,—his eyes sparkling and twinkling, and his features set in a serio-comic expression,—all combined to form a ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... whole visible world on a march one needs to go to a really large desert. The Pyramids and the Sphinx have been partly buried, and parts of the valley of the Nile threatened, by hordes of sand hills marching in from the desert; cities have been buried and harbors filled up. Many of the harbors of the ancient ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... the new opera which was to be given, and about Mrs. de Graffenried's new entertainment, and about Mrs. Ridgley-Clieveden's ball; also about the hospital for crippled children which she wanted to build, and about Mrs. Vivie Patton's rumoured divorce. And, meantime, the sphinx-like attendants moved here and there, and the dinner came and went. They took their coffee in the big chairs by the fire; and the table was swept clear, and the servants vanished, closing the ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... day he sat on the Prince's shoulder, and told him stories of what he had seen in strange lands. He told him of the red ibises, who stand in long rows on the banks of the Nile, and catch goldfish in their beaks; of the Sphinx, who is as old as the world itself, and lives in the desert, and knows everything; of the merchants, who walk slowly by the side of their camels, and carry amber beads in their hands; of the King of the Mountains of the Moon, who is as black as ebony, and worships a large crystal; of the great ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... construe dead tongues, or at least could when he left college a few months back, but now his life, the life of his crew, the salving of the dock, and the winning of a possible fortune, depended upon his answering the riddle of this Twentieth Century Sphinx. It was like attempting to understand all mathematics, from addition to ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... the two men faced each other across the room. The yellow lamplight plainly revealed their different expressions. The Padre's smile was inimitable in its sphinx-like obscurity, but Buck's eyes were ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... a steel-built city who had all that money could buy, she had gold and dividends and trains and houses, and she had pets to play with, but she had no sphinx. ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... and she was trying to look like the Sphinx that advertises What's-his-name's Personally Conducted Tours up the Nile when the sharp ting of the signal announced the up train. The children rushed out to see it pass. On its engine were the particular driver and fireman who were now numbered among the children's dearest ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... officially acknowledges that prostitution is necessary; on the other, it prosecutes and punishes the prostitute and the pimp. But it is out of contradictions that bourgeois society is put together. Moreover, the attitude of the Government is an avowal that prostitution is a Sphinx to modern society, the riddle which society can not solve: it considers necessary to tolerate and superintend prostitution in order to avoid greater evils. In other words, our social system, so boastful of its morality, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... have been women, and with regard to those others—the male minority—well, Mrs. Bethune could sometimes prove unkind, and there are men who do not readily forgive. Her mouth is curious, large and full, but not easily to be understood. Her eyes may speak, but her mouth is a sphinx. Yet it is a lovely mouth, and the little teeth behind it shine like pearls. For the rest, she is a widow. She married very badly; went abroad with her husband; buried him in Montreal; and came home again. Her purse is as slender ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... approaching, whose conjunction, free From all impediment and bar, brings on A season, in the which, one sent from God, (Five hundred, five, and ten, do mark him out) That foul one, and th' accomplice of her guilt, The giant, both shall slay. And if perchance My saying, dark as Themis or as Sphinx, Fail to persuade thee, (since like them it foils The intellect with blindness) yet ere long Events shall be the Naiads, that will solve This knotty riddle, and no damage light On flock or field. Take heed; and as these words By me are ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... useless as to try to solve the enigma of the Sphinx. The dog's lips were sealed as tightly as the stone lips; the barrier between his brain and Donaldson's brain was as high as that between the man-chiseled image and the man who chiseled. He was only wasting his time on such a task, time that he should use in the framing ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... Sphinx smiles so subtly: "I give no golden rule— Yet would I warn thee, World: treat ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... the Buch der Lieder at the poem in his preface—the song of the sphinx in the enchanted wood ... and how it clutched the seeker, the poet, to its monstrous but voluptuous woman's breasts as it ravished his soul with kisses. And the ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... would live: the good ones are self-supporting. I had to learn to be so; and I tried my hand at a number of things ... adventurous, menial, commercial. ... It's not a bad thing for a man to have to live his life—and we nearly all manage to dodge it. Our first round with the Sphinx may strike something out of us—a book or a picture or a symphony; and we're amazed at our feat, and go on letting that first work breed others, as some animal forms reproduce each other without renewed fertilization. ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... fatally well to marble and stone, sir," said Hamilton, mischievously. "I fear your biographers will conceive themselves writing at the feet of a New World Sphinx, and that its frozen granite loneliness will petrify their ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... how much easier it is to cannonade rebellious insurgents than to put down the general laugh, and that the point of a joke cannot be turned by the point of the bayonet. "Punch" was seized in Paris on account of the caricature of the "Sphinx," but after twenty-four hours' consideration the order of confiscation was rescinded, and the irreverent publication now lies upon the tables of the reading-rooms. So, iron power is not beyond the reach of the shafts of wit; once make it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... for her pictures of cats. She illustrated the "Fireside Sphinx," by Agnes Repplier. Her picture of "Hot Milk" is in the Pennsylvania Academy; her "Suspense," in a private ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... justice of God and the things which had befallen him, is constantly haunting him; it has a sting in it far worse than all the other misery with which he is tormented; but it is not fixed in the hopelessness of hell by an accepted explanation more frightful than itself. Let the world-sphinx put as many riddles as she will, she can devour no man while he waits an answer from the world-redeemer. Job refused the explanation of his friends because he knew it false; to have accepted such as ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... the hawk-god of Erment south of Thebes, who became in the eighteenth to {34} twentieth dynasties especially the god of war. He appears with the hawk head, or sometimes as a hawk-headed sphinx; and he became confused with ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... the odor which not only in the animals to which it has given a name, but in many others, is a specifically sexual odor, chiefly emitted during the sexual season. The sexual odors, indeed, of most animals seem to be modifications of musk. The Sphinx moth has a musky odor which is confined to the male and is doubtless sexual. Some lizards have a musky odor which is heightened at the sexual season; crocodiles during the pairing season emit from their submaxillary glands ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... occasional loup cervier—and nothing more. Connie had examined every foot of the ground carefully, and at intervals had halted and yelled at the top of his lungs—had even persuaded 'Merican Joe to launch forth his own peculiarly penetrating call, but their only answer was the dead, sphinx-like silence ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... if it was human-faced like the Sphinx? There's no riddle to solve, whate'er the world thinks: The fiat that made it, from its heels to its hair, Wasn't simply 'Be man!' but 'Stand up and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... would not you wish to know old age? He who is never an old man, does not know the whole of human life; for old age is one of the divisions of it.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, Sir, what talk is this?' BOSWELL. 'I mean, Sir, the Sphinx's description of it;—morning, noon, and night. I would know night, as well as morning and noon.' JOHNSON. 'What, Sir, would you know what it is to feel the evils of old age? Would you have the gout? ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... sister. She knows me, but, confound it, sir, she refuses to tell me who she is. Do you think that is fair? Now, I'll tell you how it came about." He related the story of the goldfish and the pinhook. The Baron smiled comfortably to himself, a sphinx-like expression coming into his beady eyes as he stared steadily on ahead; her trim grey back seemed to ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... in a lonely central figure in a scene, the outline cuts so sharply against the horizon. Nan's eyes seemed riveted on it as she listened to Phillis's voice; it seemed to her as immovable as a Sphinx, its rigidity lending a sort of barrenness and forlornness to the landscape, a black edition of human nature set under a violet and ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... toyed idly with a gold mesh-bag suspended by a chain about her neck, and her face was sphinx-like as she waited ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... orders, apparently for the benefit of landsmen, for no one on board appeared to heed him; and high up, in front of the pilot-house, the spruce captain, in gold-laced cap, and glass in hand, as immovable as the Sphinx. ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... quarrel arises over the question of passing,—a quarrel as to the merit of which the legend is silent. Oedipus kills his antagonist, and that antagonist is his father. Then he delivers Thebes from the scourge of the Sphinx and receives the hand of Queen Jocasta as his due reward. He has forgotten the oracle, or imagines that he has eluded his foreordained fate by leaving Corinth; but the oracle has fulfilled itself, as the spectator knew from the beginning that it would. The interest of the tragedy ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... keno, and stud-poker were going in full blast. The proprietor, his elegant diamonds flashing in the light, was seated on a raised platform from whence he could survey the entire company—his face, impassive as marble and unreadable as the sphinx, was turned toward the faro lay-out, which this evening appeared to be the ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... few will agree with his brother that his writings show unusual aptitude and profound knowledge in these sciences, or that, as he says, "the thinker was always on a level with the poet," nobody can deny the constant questioning of the Sphinx, the eager, restless pursuit of truth, which pervades his pages. He pushed his search through a long course of reading,—Descartes, Spinoza, Cabanis, Maine de Biran—only to fall back upon an innate faith in God which never forsook him, although it was strangely disconnected ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various |
