Top 100 Old Riddles And Sayings
#1. Life, U May told her, is a gift full of riddles in which suffering and happiness are inextricably intertwined. Any attempt to have one without the other was simply bound to fail. The monastery itself was surrounded
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#2. You speak to me in riddles, you speak to me in rhymes, my body aches to breathe your breath, your word keeps me alive.
Sarah McLachlan
#3. Answers? Ha, he would say that. More like riddles, mazes, labyrinths. If there's some power trying to show me the way, it should give better directions.
Megan Chance
#4. From time to time
I once wondered how one wanders from time to time
And think up the paradox line
Speak of Epoch's crime
Oh I lied, it hasn't happened yet
But bet you better believe it's such a habit that
I just said that in a past mindset
Criss Jami
#5. Every game has its Jacks,' she said, the sadness of it pulling down the elation of sudden understanding. 'The thing that acts as a wild card. It can't be counted on or predicted. A weapon, even. But he's in other places, too, isn't he? And do you know what else a Jack is, Puck? ... I do.
Ruth Frances Long
#6. Some cities, like wrapped boxes under Christmas trees, conceal unexpected gifts, secret delights. Some cities will always remain wrapped boxes, containers of riddles never to be solved, nor even to be seen by vacationing visitors, or, for that matter, the most inquisitive, persistent travelers.
Truman Capote
#7. Anything which throws light upon the Universe, anything which reveals us to ourselves, should be welcome in this world of riddles.
Aleister Crowley
#8. I have damaged my intellect trying to imagine why a man should want to invent a repeating clock, and how another man could be found to lust after it and buy it. The man who can guess these riddles is far on the way to guess why the human race was invented - which is another riddle which tires me.
Mark Twain
#9. 'The Hobbit' was one of the first biggish books I ever read. I remember vividly the 'riddles in the dark' passage, and it meant a lot to me to finally get to play it after all these years.
Andy Serkis
#10. As you may well know by now, the Givers are mysterious, and love to speak in riddles. It's more annoying than having sand in your underpants ...
James Dashner
#11. My wife was a riddle. I think all women are. Men are not riddles, even the smart ones. We are independent clauses, such as: "I like meat." "Water feel good.
Harrison Scott Key
#12. All I wanted, even when I hated you most, was some poor, barren, parched excuse to love you. But you only gave me riddles.
Patricia A. McKillip
#13. Dreams are chequered commentary made in sleep
Along the deeps of our desires,
moving like riddles through a magic glade
Lightly they touch the leap of hidden fires.
John Bradburn
#14. Mysteries are not riddles. Mysteries are places to go with your mind. You go into mysteries.
Frederick Lenz
#15. Tis but a day we sojourn here below,
And all the gain we get is grief and woe,
Then, leaving our life's riddles all unsolved,
And burdened with regrets, we have to go.
Omar Khayyam
#16. Samsa certainly had no idea what lay ahead. He was in the dark about everything: the future, of course, but the present and the past as well . What was right, and what was wrong? Just learning how to dress was a riddle.
Haruki Murakami
#17. Lithuanian nation must be saved, as it is the key to all the riddles - not only philology, but also in history - to solve the puzzle.
Immanuel Kant
#18. For a while, O King, the gods had sought to solve the riddles of Time, for a while They made him Their slave, and Time smiled and obeyed his masters, for a while, O King, for a while. He that hath spared nothing hath not spared the gods, nor yet shall he spare thee.
Lord Dunsany
#19. All of life's riddles are answered in the movies.
Steve Martin
#20. True affection is a body of enigmas, mysteries and riddles, wherein two so become one that they both become two.
Thomas Browne
#21. Let us consider that we are all insane. It will explain us to each other. It will unriddle many riddles
Mark Twain
#22. Sometimes I grow
so tired of speaking
my emotions to you.
I open my mouth
and dust spills out
instead of feelings.
Dust, and the yellow
wings of moths,
and brittle paper,
scrawled over
with riddles that
lack solutions.
Gabriel Gadfly
#23. Thou lov'st to speak in riddles and dark words.
Sophocles
#24. You know what your problem is, it's that you haven't seen enough movies - all of life's riddles are answered in the movies.
Steve Martin
Steve Martin
#26. For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the "riddles of the universe," or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man.
Hannah Arendt
#27. Do dreams mirror reality, or is it the other way round? The answers to such riddles are hidden from us
Jacob Rosenberg
#28. I love math and was a math teacher for many years, so it was fun for me to write several math books, including 'Fraction Fun,' 'Calculator Riddles,' and 'Shape Up!' 'Fun with Triangles and Other Polygons.'
David A. Adler
#29. Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.
Carl Sandburg
#31. What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees,
Up, up it goes,
And yet never grows?
(Answer: a mountain)
J.R.R. Tolkien
#32. She remembered Grace telling her about Lorcan's evasiveness when she'd first joined the Noctourne-his ability to speak without saying anything, to talk in riddles.
He's a conundrum, thought Cheng Li. A walking, talking conundrum
Justin Somper
#33. Women, as they are like riddles in being unintelligible, so generally resemble them in this, that they please us no longer once we know them.
Alexander Pope
#34. There are more riddles in a stone than in a philosopher's head
Damon Knight
#35. Women are riddles - I only argued upon the common sense of the thing.
Frederick Marryat
#36. To become rich is easy. Much harder is to solve the riddles of of the heart.
Publilius Syrus
#37. People act like riddles are hard, but real life is harder. In real life, there are always more than two doors -Sherm
Rebecca Stead
#38. This is one of man's oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature's laws?
Max Planck
#39. The world now has a new kind of hero, one who listens more than speaks, who preaches in riddles not in certainties, a leader who doesn't show his face, who says his mask is really a mirror. And in the Zapatistas, we have not one dream of a revolution, but a dreaming revolution.
Naomi Klein
#40. You say some Greek philosophers could dazzle their audiences
with their riddles? That does not interest me at all. Bring
more wine instead and play your lute; your changes in tones
remind me of the wind that rushes past and disappears,
just like us.
Omar Khayyam
#41. Freud "interpreted" dreams by treating them as intellectual riddles whose details, once processed through free association, exposed hidden wishes.
Rodger Kamenetz
#42. I have to take what I say and make it heavy, so every single bar means something. And there's no riddles in my rhymes. Every single word means something.
Ice-T
#43. The only thing worse than a voice inside your head is a voice inside your head that only speaks in riddles.
Pierdomenico Baccalario
#44. Her exact words were: Your brother is growing in his gift of the in-between, but he doesn't know which way to walk the line. The Light he found will lead him; its wings sit beneath the heart. But he must touch the violets and lilies to find surrender, to find his hidden blood. Damn riddles.
Rachel A. Marks
#45. What is the little one thinking about?
Very wonderful things, no doubt;
Unwritten history!
Unfathomed mystery!
Yet he laughs and cries, and eats and drinks,
And chuckles and crows, and nods and winks,
As if his head were as full of kinks
And curious riddles as any sphinx!
J.G. Holland
#46. All gifts are riddles, all lives/are in the middle of mother-lives.
Brenda Shaughnessy
#48. It's just a bunch of dumb, random facts," Annabeth insisted. "Riddles are supposed to make you think." "Think?" The Sphinx frowned. "How am I supposed to test whether you can think? That's ridiculous! Now, how much force is required -
Rick Riordan
#49. You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone.
Ben Okri
#50. And on the worlds of five galaxies, now, people delve your imagery and meaning for the answers to the riddles of language, love, and isolation. The three words jumped his sentence like vagabonds on a boxcar.
Samuel R. Delany
#51. Dreams were important, unconscious riddles that mirrored the heart.
John Katzenbach
#52. Dreams and prophecies. Why must they always be in riddles? I hate this.
George R R Martin
#53. It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
Vladimir Nabokov
#54. I like the old wisdom
puns, riddles, spells, proverbs.
Mason Cooley
#55. Whatever our path, whatever the color or grain of our days, whatever riddles we must solve to stay alive, the secret of life somehow always has to do with the awakening and freeing of what has been asleep.
Mark Nepo
#56. That's good. Life is full of riddles that only the dead can answer," was Dad's reply.
Ben Okri
#57. Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#58. I like to be entertained, not smothered with 'literary' riddles.
Dan Jenkins
#59. On what can we now place our hopes of solving the many riddles which still exist as to the origin and composition of cosmic rays? It must be emphasized here above all that to attain really decisive progress greater funds must be made available.
Victor Francis Hess
#60. Modern literature seduces with insults, riddles, and inside stories.
Mason Cooley
#61. Said he little prince "But why do you always speak in riddles?"
"I solve them all" said the snake
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#62. Being a kid myself, I loved playing and I loved playing with words, and making up things and riddles and songs and not afraid of being silly in public.
Malachy McCourt
#63. That's your evidence? Flimsy. Maybe he secretly fights crime and he's texting infuriating riddles to his nemesis," suggested Karou.
"Yes, I'm sure that's it. Thank you.
Laini Taylor
#64. Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#65. All records are riddles, and whatever you may want people to think it's about, it may just be throwing them off. And you don't want it to get in the way of what someone else's understanding is. It's not really about anything. At the same time, it will find some meaning.
Tom Waits
#66. All riddles are blues, / And all blues are sad, / And I'm only mentioning / Some blues I've had.
Maya Angelou
#67. Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.
Mark Twain
#68. To the many, witticisms not only require to be explained, like riddles, but are also like new shoes, which people require to wear many times before they get accustomed to them.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
#69. In one thing you have not changed, dear friend," said Aragorn: "you still speak in riddles."
"What? In riddles?" said Gandalf. "No! For I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#71. Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.
Chaim Potok
#72. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
G.K. Chesterton
#73. Voiceless it cries,
Wingless flutters,
Toothless bites,
Mouthless mutters.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#74. What more could I have done when I did not know that to love is both to seek and to be sought? For me love was nothing but a dialogue of little riddles, with no answers given.
Yukio Mishima
#75. Richard clenched the strip in his fist. It's some kind of riddle. I hate riddles.
Terry Goodkind
#76. You're just being cryptic again. It's like soap opera sex. Lots of boring dialogue and when they finally do go to bed, everything's dark and covered by blankets.
Ragnar Tornquist
#77. Absurdly simple, like most riddles when you see the answer.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#78. I think when I started to write 'The Mysterious Benedict Society' that I had that kind of thing in mind - the notion of having to be able to solve puzzles and riddles because enormous stakes rode upon your ability to do that.
Trenton Lee Stewart
#79. At times poems can be like riddles, too difficult to decipher or comprehend. But how else does one come to understand what can only be felt but not said?
Raneem Kayyali
#80. As a teacher, Tengo pounded into his students' heads how voraciously mathematics demanded logic. Here things that could not be proven had no meaning, but once you had succeeded in proving something, the world's riddles settled into the palm of your hand like a tender oyster.
Haruki Murakami
#81. It's just that I take riddling seriously. I was taught that the ability to solve them indicates a sane and rational mind.
Stephen King
#82. There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world- its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles.
Anne Rice
#83. Speech does not always unravel matters. Words can betray you, their labyrinthine threads tangled in knots, for we were cursed at that great tower of Babel, to speak always in riddles and never yet to comprehend.
Ned Hayes
#84. Language as a communication tool is the primary element from which literature is created. Even in pre-literate societies, it exists as songs, riddles, or epics that are chanted.
F. Sionil Jose
#85. It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers.
Thomas Kuhn
#86. The mind loves riddles but not the heart. The heart loves only to touch and be touched.
Marty Rubin
#87. Riddles, I hate fucking riddles," Ristan growled and shook his dark head. "Why couldn't she have sent a minotaur, or maybe David Bowie and a bunch of Muppets to mess with us?
Amelia Hutchins
#88. Life is essentially a series of events to be lived through rather than intellectual riddles to be played with and solved.
George Arthur Buttrick
#89. A lot of the lyrics I write involve images that just swing the song in a way that feels really good to me and there isn't a literal explanation. They're not riddles for the listener to solve.
Matt Berninger
#90. What Profiteth It A Kingdom If The Oxen Be Deflated?' - Riddles II, v3
Terry Pratchett
#91. Hamlet, Kiekegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates.
Harold Bloom
#92. But beyond the bright searchlights of science,
Out of sight of the windows of sense,
Old riddles still bid us defiance,
Old questions of Why and of Whence.
William Cecil Dampier
#93. Life is the greatest of all mysteries, and though I seek to solve its many riddles, my deepest fear is that I will succeed.
Brian Rathbone
#94. The scientist should treasure the riddles he can't solve, not explain them away at the outset.
Roberto Unger
#95. You got infinite channels and limitless rhymes, but the riddles of livin' stay undefined?
David Mutti Clark
#96. I'm more concerned, just as you used to be, with the world as a riddle than with the riddles in the world. I'm more concerned with natural than the supernatural. And I feel more wonder for our inscrutable brain than for all these loose anecdots about the 'extrasensory'.
Jostein Gaarder
#97. What we've got here is a lunatic genius ghost-in-the-computer monorail that likes riddles and goes faster than the speed of sound. Welcome to the fantasy version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Stephen King
#98. Sawcy, and ouer-bold, how did you dare
To Trade, and Trafficke with Macbeth,
In Riddles, and Affaires of death;
And I the Mistris of your Charmes,
The close contriuer of all harmes,
Was neuer call'd to beare my part,
Or shew the glory of our Art?
William Shakespeare
#99. Pain helps the body grow.
Riddles help the mind grow.
Loss helps the heart grow.
Temptations help the soul grow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#100. Your human gods love to present you with such riddles and challenges, or so it has seemed to me for most of my life ... You often seem to prefer difficult choices when simple alternatives are available; it is a constant source of amazement to my kind.
Raymond E. Feist
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