Top 64 The Sphinx Quotes
#1. A major difficulty is that the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx is partly a product of the answers that we already have given to the riddle in its various forms.
Gregory Bateson
#2. Polo: "You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours."
Khan: "Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.
Italo Calvino
#3. And the Sphinx broke its long silence:
Don't expect too much.
Carl Sandburg
#4. The problem of Eternity, of which the face of the Sphinx speaks, takes us into the realm of the impossible. Even the problem of Time is simple in comparison with the problem of Eternity.
P.D. Ouspensky
#5. My ex-girlfriend was very sexy. She reminded me of the Sphinx because she was very mysterious and eternal and solid ... and her nose was shot off by French soldiers.
Emo Philips
#6. It is of first-class importance that our answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx should be in step with how we conduct our civilisation, and this should in turn be in step with the actual workings of living systems.
Gregory Bateson
#7. What's this?' she asked. 'Is it a sphinx?'
Yes,' he answered, 'and the sphinx is you.
Ivan Turgenev
#8. Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.
Gustave Le Bon
#9. Sphinx Resurrected by Christine Murphy gives a new romantic twist to the realm of the paranormal. The world building is extraordinary and pulls you in to the powerful domain of the Sphinx Warriors and won't let you go.
Marti Ziegler
#10. It's like the riddle of the Sphinx ... why are there so many great unmarried women, and no great unmarried men?
Sarah Jessica Parker
#11. The Sphinx is missing a nose. Someone shot it off in a moment of idle desecration - some say it was Mameluke Turks, others, Napoleonic soldiers.
Carl Sagan
#12. 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
#13. Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never be an answer to the sphinx's riddle.
William James
#14. The Sphinx extended a hand. Seth shook it. "One last thing, Seth. Are you aware that Midsummer Eve is scarcely a week away?" "Yeah." "Might I make a suggestion?" "Okay." "Don't open any windows.
Brandon Mull
#15. There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#16. He spoke of dreams and never named the dreamer, of a glass candle that could not be lit and eggs that would not hatch. He said the sphinx was the riddle, not the riddler, whatever that meant.
George R R Martin
#17. The population question is the real riddle of the sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication, all other riddle sink into insignificance.
Thomas Huxley
#18. When we find something new at Giza, we announce it to the world. The Sphinx and the Pyramids are world treasures. We are the guardian's of these treasures, but they belong to the world.
Zahi Hawass
#19. The worst stage was when one could tell she was still awake and almost alert, but she knew that nothing worked. Imprisoned. She was imprisoned. In a statue like the Sphinx. Looking out from the eyes. Her own mind, at that point, was as small and bewildered as a little fly. Behind great battlements.
M T Anderson
#20. The sphinx will always have to be looked after.
Zahi Hawass
#21. This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home.
Agnes Repplier
#22. It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
Gregory Bateson
#24. His face bore an imperial nose, one belonging to the same pedigree as the one venomously blasted from the face of the Sphinx statue by Greek envy.
David B. Dacosta
#25. There are many kinds of eyes. Even the sphinx has eyes - and consequently there are many kinds of 'truths,' and consequently there is no truth
Friedrich Nietzsche
#26. The pyramid once passed there was still a short way to go before we confronted the Sphinx, in the middle of what our contemporaries have left him of his desert.
Pierre Loti
#27. Yours...'til the Sphinx winks.
M. Allen
#28. The Sphinx-riddle. Solve it, or be torn to bits, is the decree.
D.H. Lawrence
#29. The sphinx is the riddle, not the riddler. Do you knows what that means?
No. Is it a riddle?
George R R Martin
#30. Just last week, gunmen on a motorcycle shot and killed two tourism police officers near the gate of the complex that contains the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx, across the Nile from Cairo and about 400 miles north of Luxor.
Anonymous
#31. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#32. Every period of time is a sphinx that throws itself into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved.
Heinrich Heine
#33. Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.
Oscar Wilde
#34. A beautiful woman can be painted as a totem only; not as a woman, but as a Madonna, a queen, a sphinx.
Saul Steinberg
#35. Lady Anne sighed and whispered to Penelope, My brother stands guard over me like a sphinx or a fiery dragon. Only men with courage are allowed to make way to my side, and unfortunately England is full of chicken-hearted nitwits.
Anya Wylde
#36. What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination
Allen Ginsberg
#37. There's a very loud noise in my ear, not unlike a cat sneezing, if the cat is the size of the Great Sphinx of Giza and it's just inhaled three tons of snuff.
Charles Stross
#38. 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
#39. A sphinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined. Unknowable. Indefinable. Those were all the words Brandy used to describe me in my veils. Not just a story that goes and then, and then, and then, and then until you die.
Chuck Palahniuk
#40. I have a great interest in classical mythology and I need to make a sphinx or satyr every once in awhile to satisfy those interests. ( ... )
Wendy Froud
#42. In the beginning, Orion was not considered to be a hunter but as the heretic cult grew, its adherent dared to war the upper heavens and were set off on a quest for hunting the lion (i.e., Sphinx) in its own dwelling. This is literally what 'Orion' the word means, the 'dwelling of the lion'.
Ibrahim Ibrahim
#43. Drowsing, they take the noble attitude of a great sphinx, who, in a desert land, sleeps always, dreaming dreams that have no end.
Charles Baudelaire
#44. It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon.
H.P. Lovecraft
#45. offered an overland excursion to view pyramids and sphinx,
Jonquil Graham
#46. Older recordings just seemed to take me somewhere into my own pre-history. That's always been an interesting, sort of sphinx-like territory for me to wander around in.
Guy Maddin
#47. I'm trying to figure out if you know something that I don't, or if you're really this stupid. You might be older and therefore a lot stronger than I am, Sphinx, but I am a mother and a lot more pissed off than you.
S.R. Crawford
#48. When the Amherst sphinx styled herself a pagan, she meant she didn't believe in the biblical God. What sort of deity, if any, she did believe in is hard to pinpoint.
Gary Sloan
#49. Mathematics, as far as he was concerned, was a Sphinx charged with deceitful puzzles whose cold malicious gaze transfixed her victims, and he gave the monster a wide berth.
Hermann Hesse
#50. In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.
Jorge Luis Borges
#51. She could talk. If she was a sphinx she could have talked, if she was a stone she could have talked. I wondered when she'd get tired and leave. Even after I stopped listening it was like being battered with tiny pingpong balls.
Charles Bukowski
#53. Pity for him who one day looks uponhis inward sphinx and questions it. He is lost.
Ruben Dario
#54. Are there any mythical beasts which aren't simple pastiches of nature? Centaurs, minotaurs, unicorns, griffons, chimeras, sphinxes, manticores, and the like don't speak well for the human imagination. None is as novel as a kangaroo or starfish.
William Poundstone
#55. For I am I: ergo, the truth of myself; my own sphinx, conflict, chaos, vortex - asymmetric to all rhythms, oblique to all paths. I am the prism between black and white: mine own unison in duality.
Austin Osman Spare
#56. Can't you nudge her into submission? (Taryn)
Are you kidding? As stubborn as she is? I'd fry my brain trying. (Sphinx)
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#57. I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.
Charles Baudelaire
#59. Every human face is more enigmatic than the timeworn expression on the famous Sphinx out there in the sands of Egypt.
Dean Koontz
#60. She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.
Oscar Wilde
#61. Tell me, when you are alone with him [ Max Beerbohm ] Sphinx, does he take off his face and reveal his mask?
Oscar Wilde
#62. She moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.
Laini Taylor
#63. On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw
A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,
A Buddha, hand at rest,
Hand lifted up that blest;
And right between these two a girl at play
That, it may be, had danced her life away ...
William Butler Yeats
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