"Riddle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the square for the last time, turning toward the loom of the spaceship, filing the girl away as just another riddle of ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... years of exile. For, mark you, I was always the victor. Here, too, are coloured prints from Epinal. It was on them that I began to spell out those signs which to the learned reveal a few faint traces of the Mighty Riddle. Yes, the sorriest little coloured daub that ever came out of a village in the Vosges consists of print and pictures, and what is the sum and substance of Science after all but ...
— Marguerite - 1921 • Anatole France
... on the other, but the waiting-maid was blinded, and did not recognize the princess in her dazzling array. When they had eaten and drunk, and were merry, the aged King asked the waiting-maid as a riddle, what a person deserved who had behaved in such and such a way to her master, and at the same time related the whole story, and asked what sentence such an one merited? Then the false bride said: "She deserves no better fate ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... pallid as with snows, stretched the gray woods. The moon shone very brightly, and there was no wind. So unearthly was the quiet of the night, so solemn the light, so high and still and calm the universe around him, that awe fell upon his soul. It was well to lie upon the hilltop and guess at the riddle of the world; now dimly to see the meaning, now to lose it quite, to wonder, to think of death. The easy consciousness that for him death was scores of years away, that he should not meet the spectre until the wine was all drunken, the garlands withered, and he, the guest, ready to depart, ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... it was that he judged to be the chiefest actor in the murder of the king, he answered in this short enigma or riddle:— ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... portmanteau. I wot ye know not the use of this." To the Barbarian's intense indignation, the Cicerone produced, from under his, his (the Barbarian's) own opera hat. "Marry, what should be this? Read me this riddle! To it—and unyoke!" ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... to the Duke that you may be faithful to the Duchy?" he questioned, scorn running ever stronger in his voice. "Sirs, it is a riddle I'll not ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... glance, she decided to copy it. She did not know where to look for a sheet of paper, but remembered several paper bags on the pantry shelves, so she went in search of one. Finding one with only a cupful of sugar left in it, she tore off the top and wrote the riddle on that with a stub of a pencil which she found ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... curious to solve the riddle. A door which she had often noticed, but never seen opened, now stood wide open, and the old quadrangular garden, which was James Steadman's particular care, smiled at her in the golden evening light. Seen thus, this little old Dutch garden seemed to Mary the prettiest thing she had ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... narrative I have particularly noticed the sudden disappearance of the cattle, which we had brought with us into the country. Not a trace of them has ever since been observed. Their fate is a riddle, so difficult of solution that I shall not attempt it. Surely had they strayed inland, in some of our numerous excursions, marks of them must have been found. It is equally impossible to believe that either the convicts or natives ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... as ingenious a series of books for little folks as has ever appeared since "Alice in Wonderland." The idea of the Riddle books is a little group of children—three girls and three boys decide to form a riddle club. Each book is full of the adventures and doings of these six youngsters, but as an added attraction each book is filled with a lot of the ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... 'to transfer the sense of his own nature, in the radical explanation of all phenomena whatever.' Writing in the same key, Schopenhauer calls man 'a metaphysical animal.' He is speaking of the need man feels of a theory, in regard to the riddle of existence, which forces itself upon his notice; 'a need arising from the consciousness that behind the physical in the world, there is a metaphysical something permanent as the foundation of constant change.' ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... thought of a riddle:—'What is that, which, the more you divide it, the greater it grows?' You will guess in a minute that I mean pleasure; for indeed, my dear Emily, at this distance from you all, when each delight is unshared by those I so dearly love, I seem to enjoy ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... looked up into the vast countenance of the crouching Sphinx and vainly tried to read the meaning of her calm eyes and smiling mouth. Was it, indeed, the mockery of all effort and all aspiration, as Tigranes had said—the cruel jest of a riddle that has no answer, a search that never can succeed? Or was there a touch of pity and encouragement in that inscrutable smile—a promise that even the defeated should attain a victory, and the disappointed should discover a prize, and ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... long ago writing for the booksellers, had become affluent enough to pay a yearly allowance to Barry, the painter, in order to enable him to study the pictures in the great European galleries, and to make a prolonged residence at Rome. A little later he took a step which makes the riddle still more difficult, and which has given abundant employment to wits who are maximi in minimis, and think that every question which they can ask, yet to which history has thought it worth while to leave no answer, is somehow a triumph of their ...
— Burke • John Morley
... original color. Now for the brown color. This probably makes the caterpillar even more conspicuous among the green leaves than would otherwise be the case. Let us see, then, whether the habits of the insect will throw any light upon the riddle. What would you do if you were a big caterpillar? Why, like most other defenceless creatures, you would feed by night, and lie concealed by day. So do these caterpillars. When the morning light comes, they creep down the ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... things conducted on the presumption that scientific knowledge is the key to unlock the mystery and resolve the riddle ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... mean time, have not relinquished the inquiry, and try, as they become more closely acquainted with your mode of life and thought, to guess many a riddle, to solve many a problem; indeed, with the assistance of an old liking, and a connection of many years' standing, they find a charm even in the difficulties which present themselves. Yet a little assistance here and there would not be unacceptable, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... we may not throw the gospels into the waste-paper basket, or put them away on the fiction shelf of our libraries. I venture to reply that we shall be, on the contrary, in the position of the man in Bunyan's riddle who found that "the more he threw away, the more he had. "We get rid, to begin with, of the idolatrous or iconographic worship of Christ. By this I mean literally that worship which is given to pictures and statues of him, and to finished and unalterable stories about ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... grandfather fought in the War of 1812; my father sacrificed his health in the Civil War; but I, though born in New England, am the first of my family to emigrate to this country—the United States of America. That sounds like a riddle or a paradox. It isn't; it's a ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... came there upon the floor was a riddle which I was too much bewildered to explain by any natural means. Joseph, who burst in upon me, in my extremity of pain and difficulty, solved it at once. It had fallen out of the glove, where it had lain folded, silent, unnoticed, during all this intervening period of folly and vexation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... that jest became. The vast drifting indifference in between my meetings impressed me more and more. I realised the vagueness of my own plans as I had never done before I brought them to the test of this experience. I was perplexed by the riddle of just how far I was, in any sense of the word, taking hold at all, how far I wasn't myself ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... was solved, the riddle made clear. I could contain my gravity no longer, but burst into a hearty fit of laughter, in which I was joined by Hannah. Our young lady was mortally offended; she tossed the decanter from hand to hand, and glared at us with her ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... have thus been exhibited in the case of Hercules and of Castor, and it remains to inquire what Etruria did. There is no race about which we know so much and yet so little as about the Etruscans. They have always been and still are a riddle, and as our knowledge of them increases we seem further than ever from a solution, and what we gain in positive knowledge is more than counterbalanced by the increased sense of our ignorance. Altogether aside ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... the man at the window for an answer to the riddle. But Matheson's face was set, and the answer to the riddle was such as Lars Larssen could never have guessed. It lay outside the shipowner's pale of thought—beyond the ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... then, to the life of her Lord for the solution of this riddle. Last week[1] He was going to His Death. He was losing, little by little, all that bound Him to Life. The multitudes that had followed Him hitherto were leaving Him by units and groups, they who might have formed His armies to seat ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... hand 'twould be amusing to behold the illustrious Dorias in this evening's massacre the victims of a rascally Moor. No. This doubtful question a Christian might perhaps resolve, but 'tis too deep a riddle for my Moorish brains. I'll go propose it to ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... time is momentous for all nations, the future is a tangled riddle; for the Slavs this seems true in a double measure. To involved social problems is added race opposition in the breasts of neighbors, a deep, sullen historic hostility. Hence when a writer of power appears among the Slavs, whether he takes up the past or the present, he ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... unsolved riddle of Tibet, Petrie," he replied—"a mystery concealed from the world behind the veil of Lamaism." He stood up abruptly, glancing at a scrap of paper which he took from his pocket—"Suite Number 14a," he said. "Come along! We have not a moment to waste. Let us make our presence known ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... inspection of the omens said to him: 'Whatever it is which you have in mind, Vespasian, whether it is to build a house or to enlarge your estate, or to increase the number of your slaves, there is granted to you a great habitation, vast acres, and a multitude of men.' Rumour had immediately seized on this riddle and now began to solve it. Nothing was more talked of, especially in Vespasian's presence: such conversation is the food ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... world of a man all compact of imagination and sleepless energy; the touch in him of "the imperishable child," combined with the brooding intensity of the explorer who is always guessing at the next riddle; the fun, simplicity, bonhomie he showed with those who knew him well—all these are vividly ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ...! I almost said somethin' I oughtn't to!—[He steps back among the people.] I'll give you a riddle to guess. Shall I? Still waters run deep! 'Tis bad. You mustn't taste blood—no, no! The thirst only gets worse ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Then she resumes her household work; whereupon Ormuzd whispers in the pledge's projecting ear, and that heaven-directed bimbo straightway turns his head toward the dust-hole, and, again illustrating the first clause of the Sphynx's not very complicated riddle, keeps the strictly noiseless tenor of his way, till Ahriman's priestess looks round to see the metaphors fulfilled, of the pup turning again to his ashheap, and the papoose that was washed wallowing in the dust-hole. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... last twenty-one years, demanding of Congress to take the necessary step to secure to the women of this nation protection in the exercise of their constitutional right to a voice in the government." She introduced the Hon. Albert G. Riddle (D. C.), who in 1871 had made an argument before the Joint Judiciary Committee in favor of woman's right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment; and later had argued before the Supreme Court her right to vote in the District. In the course of his remarks he said: "All ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... from commerce with the Americans, and which were the ostensible object proposed in planting the colonies, were not sufficient: if we could obtain it, we must share in their profits likewise. But this was a question which time only could solve; a riddle, which events ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Oracle in turn I leaned the Secret of my Love to learn. The Answering Riddle came: "She loves you, yes, In just Proportion to ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... it will be remembered, was formed by Brother Frink in 1840. The members were: Robert Curren, Leader, Sarah Curren, T.M. Riddle, Adeline Riddle, Gideon Wales, Polly Wales, Mark Johnson, Ann Butterfield, Margaret Underwood, Charles Curran, Frank Morgan, Mrs. Frank Morgan, and Mrs. Fellows. To these were soon added, Mr. and Mrs. Carlton, Mr. and Mrs. Raymond. This Society had already ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... fragmentariness of our knowledge, not only of divine providence as a whole, but even of those divine providences that fill up our own lives. And he warns us that, till we have heard the "Prologue in Heaven," many a riddle in our lives must of necessity remain unsolved. Christiana could not have told her inquiring children what a prologue was, nor an epilogue either, but many were the wise and winning discourses she held with her ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... physical science is recognised as containing truth, it is difficult to believe that in the highest things we depend upon the key-note of the soul. Knowledge thereby becomes an intimate personal concern. But this is what it really is to the Mystic. Tell some one the solution of the riddle of the universe! Give it him ready-made! The Mystic will find it to be nothing but empty sound, if the personality does not meet the solution half-way in the right manner. The solution in itself is nothing; it vanishes ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... storm, though the brain received as yet no clear message. She felt, struggling with that diffused kindness and young vanity, something like discomfort and fear. So her mood was complex enough, unharmonized, parted between opposing currents. She was a riddle ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... got to get on the other side of the door by strategy, either. It is strategy-proof. The system of lookouts is perfect. No, force is necessary, but it must not be destructive of life or property—or, by heaven, I'd drive up there and riddle the place with a fourteen-inch ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... Amarilly, "what possessed the cow. She's been so gentle always, and then to fly to pieces that way, and riddle the surplice to bits! It was lucky there was ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... to make a plan for outflanking a wing or threatening a line of communications upon a map, where he can regulate the positions of both parties to suit himself; but when he has opposed to him a skillful, active, and enterprising adversary, whose movements are a perfect riddle, then his difficulties begin, and we see an exhibition of the incapacity of an ordinary general with none ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... the establishment of the Kit-Cat club has never been decided, the consensus of opinion fixes the year somewhere about 1700. More debatable, however, is the question of its peculiar title. The most recent efforts to solve that riddle leave it where the contemporary ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... of the tradition of American romance, captivated by her vibrant charm, her poise and superiority under the circumstances, her obvious readiness to dismiss him, was overcome, as the human mind frequently is, by a riddle of the spirit, a chemical reaction as mysterious to its victim as to one who is its witness. Stepping forward with a motion that was at once gallant, reverent, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... would enjoy their society as long as possible, and the children's play was never hushed on his account. Nor did he forget the young visitor. When the elder daughter, to whom my visit was made, was at school, he would care for my entertainment by telling a story, or propounding a riddle, or providing an entertaining book to beguile the time till ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... years later, when after his mother's death it became his duty to read letters exchanged between his parents during this period, did Dominic Iglesias touch the key to the riddle, and fully measure the public danger, the private strain and stress which had surrounded his childhood and early youth. For his father, a man of far from ignoble nature, but of narrow outlook and undying hatreds, was deeply involved in revolutionary intrigue of the most ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... scholastic intelligence, succulently appreciative, blind, hopelessly blind to the fact that every great work of art is a strenuous, an almost despairing effort to express and convey, treats the whole thing as some foolish riddle—"explains it to the children." As if every picture was a rebus and every poem a charade! "Little children," he says, "this teaches ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... life is said to be the finding of a happiness that is not enjoyed at the expense of others, and surely this class have solved that Sphinx's riddle, for they float through their days in a dream of complacency disturbed neither by corroding doubt nor harassed ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... we were only an hour's run from Mudros, there came by wireless the inspiring news that solved the riddle of the chain of transports in the Mediterranean and the empty hospitals in Alexandria. The simple typed message that was pinned on the notice-board, and could scarcely be read for the crowds surrounding it, ran: "We have landed in strong ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... have been able to discover nothing about either this Plautius or this Hirrius, but it appears that Archelaus wrote a book under the title Bugonia, of which nothing survives. It may be conjectured, however, on the analogy of Samson's riddle to the Philistines, "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness," (Judges, XIV, 14), that Plautius meant to imply that some good might be the consequence of the evil Hirrius had done: and that Vaccius cited the allusion to suggest to Varro that, ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... here indicate wherein it lies, and how it differs from and falls short of the mysticism of Shelley and Browning. Rossetti, unlike Browning, is not the least metaphysical; he is not devoured by philosophical curiosity; he has no desire to solve the riddle of the universe. All his life he was dominated and fascinated by beauty, one form of which in especial so appealed to him as at times almost to overpower him—the beauty of the face of woman.[11] But this ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... black, sparkling eyes asked Dominic familiarly what had happened to his Signorino. It was her name for me. I was Dominic's Signorino. She knew me by no other; and our connection has always been somewhat of a riddle to her. She said that I was somehow changed since she saw me last. In her rich voice she urged Dominic only to look at my eyes. I must have had some piece of luck come to me either in love or at cards, ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... two or three great national ideals might not thrive and develop, that men of different races might not strive together for their race ideals as well, perhaps even better, than in isolation. Here, it seems to me, is the reading of the riddle that puzzles so many of us. We are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion. Farther than that, our Americanism does not go. At that point, we are Negroes, members of a vast historic race that from the very dawn of creation ...
— The Conservation of Races - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 2 • W. E. Burghardt Du Bois
... remember the beginning. She knew that she was nothing to the image, and that it was nothing to her. While her lips repeated the grand dirge of the King-poet in Saint Jerome's noble old Latin words, her thoughts followed broken threads, each cut short by a question that lacks an answer, by the riddle man has asked of the sky and the sea and the earth since the beginning: ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... councillorship query remained, of course, a riddle to her, yet she handed him the paper without replying. It was a coarse wood-cut, representing a splendid meteor "as seen in the town of Cologne," which was to be ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... alarm of illness seizing grandfather. He had been taken with a sudden faintness. Of course we sent for the doctor, but before he arrived the faintness had passed, so he looked wise at us, like a prize riddle which had to be guessed before his next visit, left us his autograph (a wonderful hieroglyphic), and went away. Since then grandfather has been in the hands of a less taciturn practitioner, whom he calls the 'flower of Glenfaba' (that's me), and after talking ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... say, thou cost for Vice prepare, And joys the good shall know; Thou canst the crooked heart unmask and bare; Thou canst the riddle of our fate declare, And keep account with Woe. With thee a home smiles for the exiled one— There ends the thorny strife. Unto my side a godlike vision won, Called TRUTH, (few know her, and the many shun,) And check'd the reins ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... would have seemed to himself to be acquitting her of all criminality; whereas Monica, from her point of view, illogically supposed that he might credit her on this one issue without overthrowing all the evidence that declared her untrustworthy. In short, she expected him to read a riddle which there was scarcely ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine once was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a hair, do I. Is't a riddle? ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... pause and a long silence, while the train sped through the darkness of the Simplon tunnel, Peter retraced the steps by which he had been enabled to solve the riddle of the Redmaynes. ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... mere man woman always will be an everlastin' puzzle and a riddle; but even a man kin appreciate, in a poor, faint way, the depths of mother love. It's ez though he looked through a break in the clouds and ketched a vision of the glories of heaven. But you ain't told me yit how you come to be in possession of this ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... I lay a-dreaming, I tried so hard to read this riddle through, To catch some golden cord that I saw gleaming Like gossamer against the ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... of your riddle, Cranmer?" queried an older and graver gentleman, who had been intently poring ...
— Three People • Pansy
... for the wooden ones, and have the advantage of greater durability and of greater strength in proportion to their size, and the number may therefore be greater in a machine of any given length. The fluid mass of clay and water may be permitted to fall upon a sieve or riddle, of heavy wire, and afterward be received in a settling vat, of suitable size and construction, to drain off the water and let the clay dry out sufficiently by subsequent evaporation. A machine of this ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... understand you," he said bluntly, and in truth he did not. This pale-faced woman with the earnest eyes deep underlined with the marks of sleepless nights was a riddle which his stiff, ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... positive assurance that she was entirely unconnected with the riddle did nothing to help me to solve it. I had, however, to solve it for the Belgian authorities, and I did so by giving a certificate that Alresca had died of "failure of the heart's action." A convenient phrase, whose convenience ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... him, or that she took him, and sacrificed herself to him, cold as he was. He laughed sardonically over the letter, and over the transaction which occasioned it. He laughed to think how Fortune had jilted him, and how he deserved his slippery fortune. He turned over and over the musky gilt-edged riddle. It amused his humour: he enjoyed it as if it had ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and he was inclined to think that Miss Wildmere's relations to Arnault, whatever they were, placed him, a committed lover, in a rather anomalous position. Since she was absent, however, he would while away an hour with Madge, and try to solve the riddle she had become. ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... alone; yet perversely, in my mind, now at the end, I know not whether I mean the Thought for the Fancy—or the Fancy for the Thought, or why the book trails off to playing, rather than standing strong on unanswering fact. But this is alway—is it not?—the Riddle ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... though it was such a riddle to you gentlemen of the law. When the captain came out to look at the saddle, he had the book open in his hand. When he was shot, he clapped the book to his breast with both his hands. Almost all the blood that flowed from it was caught in that book. It required some force on ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... riddle," said Dolly. "I knew him when I was at school, a little girl, and I have ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... the causes and results of Pessimism. It can touch the practical side of the riddle of life by asking certain questions, the answers to which lie within the province of human experience. Among these ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... thou wouldst wend with me, To leave both tower and town, Thou first must guess what life lead we That dwell by dale and down. And if thou canst that riddle read, As read full well you may, Then to the greenwood shalt thou speed, As ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... who are ready to wed two bold youths; but danger and trouble, and battle and tempest, will intervene ere their hopes will be fulfilled. If their troubles are short, so may be their joys; but long troubles may bring longer happiness. Choose you which you will, my masters—I will read you a riddle; let me hear ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... was so delighted at the way in which the farmer's daughter had solved the riddle that he immediately married her and made her his Queen. And they lived very happily together though no children came to them. The King depended upon her for advice in all his affairs and would often have ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... enigma, We shall guess it all too soon; Failure brings no kind of stigma - Dance we to another tune! String the lyre and fill the cup, Lest on sorrow we should sup; Hop and skip to Fancy's fiddle, Hands across and down the middle - Life's perhaps the only riddle That we shrink ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... inside the thermograph case. Heavens! what an insult to the self-registering meteorological instruments! I was thunderstruck, thinking, of course, that the man was making a fool of me. I had carefully studied his face all the time to find the key to this riddle, and did not know whether to laugh or weep. Lindstrom's face was certainly serious enough; if it afforded a measure of the situation, I believe tears would have been appropriate. But when my eye fell ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... these things are mere details, but how people can get married and bring up a family when they have not enough for themselves while they are bachelors, is a riddle to me. It almost looks as if babies brought their food with them when they come into this world; it really almost does look as if ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... Let me tell your worship that for a man to whip himself in cold blood is a hard thing, especially if the stripes fall upon an ill-nourished and worse-fed body. Let my lady Dulcinea have patience, and when she is least expecting it, she will see me made a riddle of with whipping, and 'until death it's all life;' I mean that I have still life in me, and the desire to make good ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... finished her sad story she asked us to give her our opinion as to the cause of the baby's disappearance. One of our men had the most likely solution of the riddle as he thought that the baby had watched her brothers discard their overcoats, and later their coats, as the exercise while skating warmed them, and Helen, childlike, thinking this the proper thing, had in a playful mood discarded her clothes, ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... It is an easy riddle to answer. A man who gives away horses worth a hundred louis, who drinks wine at a pistole the bottle, and who lodges in a garret in the Rue du Temps Perdu, what should he ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... Germany and the Germans is a riddle. I have seen no convincing solution of it by any Englishman, and hardly any confident attempt at a solution which did not speak the uncontrolled language of passion. There is the same difficulty with the lower animals; our description of ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... riddle for you. It came to me as I was playing here just now. If everybody could do just as he pleased; if he had, as the governor would say, all his rights,—life, liberty, pursuit of happiness,—if everybody had this, I say, why ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... king of Thebes, son of Laius and Jocasta, and fated to kill his father and marry his mother; unwittingly slew his father in a quarrel; for answering the riddle of the SPHINX (q. v.) was made king in his stead, and wedded his widow, by whom he became the father of four children; on discovery of the incest Jocasta hanged herself, and Oedipus went mad ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... thermometer registered 80 degrees in the shade. Do not forget that, my friend. It is the key to the whole riddle!" ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... Lydia the reservation as the Indians knew it. If Lydia was a little puzzled by his eagerness to make her understand conditions on the reservation, she gave little thought to the riddle. This adventure was affecting her deeply. There was the sudden freedom and relaxation from home responsibilities. There was the daily and intimate companionship with young people, than whom none were better dressed than she!—and ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... religion of Christ do not, however, disturb the faith of Browning in the Christian revelation of Divine love. In Cleon he exhibits the failure of Paganism, even in its forms of highest culture, to solve the riddle of life and to answer the requirements of the human spirit. All that regal power liberally and wisely used can confer belongs to Protus in his Tyranny; all that genius, and learning and art can confer is the possession of Cleon; and a profound discouragement has settled ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... a most pig-headed sot! (aloud) Young man, you cannot know the risk you run. Th' alternative's in earnest—not in fun. Dame Turandot will spin you a tough riddle, That's not to be "got thro' like any fiddle." Not such as this, which any child might guess— (Though the Emperor could not, I must confess;) "What gives a cold, cures a cold, and pays the doctor's bill?" Not ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... ever-developing nineteenth century, some real sympathy with its new wonders, some real sphere of labour in it; and this drives them to devour the very newest authors—any book whatever which seems to open for them the riddle of the mighty and mysterious present, which is forcing itself on their attention through every sense. And so up and down, amid confusions and oscillations from pole to pole, and equally eclectic at either pole, from St. Augustin and Mr. Pugin ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... saddle, see, the slanting Rays begin to fall, Flinging lights and colours flaunting Through the shadows tall. Onward! onward! must we travel? When will come the goal? Riddle I may not unravel, Cease to ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... facetious," returned O'Sullivan sourly. "But I would ask you to remember that you are not yet out of the woods, Mr. Montagu. My Lord seems satisfied, but here are some more of us waiting a plain answer to this riddle." ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... its details and in all its applications, she also had that artistic spirit of reconstruction which enabled her to apply to life what she held in theory. Along with the calm philosophic spirit which thinks out "the painful riddle of the earth," she had the creative spirit of the artist which delights in portraying life in all its endeavors, complexities and consequences. She not only accepted the theory of hereditary transmission as science has recently developed it, and as it has been enlarged by positivism ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... to his riddle. It wasn't a brick roof—ah, there was the key to the whole puzzling problem. Let him once solve that—you just let him get clear on ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... from men who can protect me by saying one word! I ain't going to stand all this riddle-come-ree business! Flat down, now, ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... quick, light step, as though hastening to keep some pleasurable appointment. After all the years of weak, bewildered subjection, of defeat and humiliation, her turn had come; she had found the answer to the Sphinx's riddle, the way ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... me. "How," he wrote to Roeckel on the 23rd. August 1856, "can an artist expect that what he has felt intuitively should be perfectly realized by others, seeing that he himself feels in the presence of his work, if it is true Art, that he is confronted by a riddle, about which he, too, might have illusions, just as ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... she replied. "I am no priest. But this I know: I have done no evil, and my conscience nevertheless is sore. Solve me the riddle, Malcolm, if ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... me not, good sir; the world to me A riddle is at best—my heart has had No tutor. From my childhood until now My thoughts have been ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... writing, remains a romantic episode, a dramatic centre of interest, from the heroic endurance and brilliant gallantry displayed by its garrison; but, from the practical side, the action of friend and foe, the fact of occupation and the conduct of {p.113} the siege, present a military riddle not readily solved. ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... my head, for the riddle seemed quite unreadable, and as we had already sat up until long past midnight I begged for my candle, and proposed to defer our conversation until the morning. Jack, declaring that none of the beds in the damp old house was fit to sleep ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... majesty," said Caroline gayly, "but the explanation of the riddle that has been puzzling all the brains in the palace for ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... as in the morning, I was but little moved by Fustov's tears. I could not conceive how it was he did not ask me if Susanna had not left something for him. Altogether their love for one another was a riddle to me; and a riddle it ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... anecdotes about our being lost through inability to riddle out our name on the part of the police, I must relate an instance where the post-office displayed remarkable powers of divination. One day I received an official notification from the post-office that there was a misdirected parcel for me from Moscow, lying in the proper office,— ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... is the western gate, Luke Havergal, There are the crimson leaves upon the wall. Go, — for the winds are tearing them away, — Nor think to riddle the dead words they say, Nor any more to feel them as they fall; But go! and if you trust her she will call. There is the western gate, ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... kindly placed Beside the ear, and in its varying tone, Who will, may make life's secret all his own. And thus misfortunes bless, for blindness brings A power to pierce the depths of hidden things, To walk where reason and fair fancy lead, To read the riddle of men's thoughts, to read The soul's arcana in each subtler tone, And make man's joys and ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... a hard thing to figure out," said Merry. "I don't think we ever will understand it until Borrodaile bobs up and clears away the mystery himself. I've a hunch that Blunt is the key to this riddle of the professor's whereabouts. The Wonder may be somewhere around—that is, if ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish
... a son, and his name was Sym; And his eyes were wide as the eyes of Truth; And there came to the wondering mind of him Long thoughts of the riddle that vexes youth. And, "Father," he said, "in the mart's loud din Is there aught of pleasure? Do some find joy?" But his father tilted the beardless chin, And looked in the eyes of the ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... favorite wid him, that I know, for we wor talkin' about you. In the meantime I wish to goodness we had a good scud o' cash among us, an' we safe an' snug in America! Now shake hands an' good bye—an' mark me—if you dhrame of America an' a long purse any o' these nights, come to me an' I'll riddle your ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... Bludlip Courtenay, sententiously—"is a riddle. Sometimes she wants a vote in elections,—then, if it's offered to her, she won't have it. Buy her a pearl, and she says she would rather have had a ruby. Give her a park phaeton, and she declares she has been ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... understand it, Though her tongue can ne'er explain: Let yon granite Sphinx demand it— Riddle, ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... I cried, slapping my thigh, "I understand!" And to myself I thought of the assignation at St. Sulpice des Reaux, and the reason for this, as also St. Auban's resolution to so suddenly quit Blois, grew of a sudden clear to me. Also did I recall the riddle touching Vilmorin's conduct which a few moments ago I had puzzled over, and of which methought that ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... me, rot-tot-tote! A little wee man, in a red red coat! A staff in his hand, and a stone in his throat; If you'll tell me this riddle, I'll ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... regards the whole of nature as one, and sees only efficient causes at work in it. Dualism, on the contrary, holds that nature and spirit, matter and force, the world and God, inorganic and organic nature, are separate and independent existences. Cf. The Riddle of the Universe chapter 12.) At this point the science of human evolution has a direct and profound bearing on the foundations of philosophy. Modern anthropology has, by its astounding discoveries ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel |
