"Enigma" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the special secret held by an Egyptian word may be found in Greek, or the secret of a Greek word in Babylonian. Language is One. The Gods who made all these languages equally could use them all, and wind them all intricately in and out, for the building up of their divine enigma. ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... girl had lied; but the story had an air of truth to it. If it were a fact that there had recently been a quarrel between these cousins, whose uncousinly attitude towards each other was fast becoming clear to Mr. Taggett, then here was a conceivable key to an enigma which had puzzled him. ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... attributed to her. Her character united kind-heartedness with inconsideration, imprudence with austerity, ardent feeling with great practical common-sense. Probably the emperor understood her very little at the time of his marriage, and that she long remained to him an enigma may have been one of her charms. With the impetuosity of her disposition and the intrepidity that had characterized her girlhood, she found it hard to submit to the restraints of her position, and the emperor had occasion frequently ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... downwards on the edge of a table. But what immediately attracted their attention was a row of those large glass vessels like that which they had seen in the adjoining room. Each was covered with a white cloth. They hesitated a moment, for they knew that here they were face to face with the great enigma. At last Arthur pulled away the cloth from one. None of them spoke. They stared with astonished eyes. For here, too, was a strange mass of flesh, almost as large as a new-born child, but there was in it the beginnings of something ghastly human. It was shaped vaguely ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... beside Filmer, motionless and flushed. Jock contemplated him from his greater height as if he were a new and startling enigma. ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... looked at her, and the old curiosity took possession of him to understand this feminine enigma. Many a man before him has been the victim of a like desire, and lived to regret that he did not leave it ungratified. It is not well to try to lift the curtain of the unseen, it is not well to call to heaven to show its glory, or ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... that. It was the failure, total, absolute, and complete, that was the only result for the month of ceaseless, unremitting, doggedly-expended effort, even as it had been the result many times before, in an attempt to solve the enigma that was so intimate and vital a factor in his ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... questions, they answer that there is nothing to be done, that no human power could avert or thwart the issue. Are they mad, bored, irritable, or accessory to a hideous pleasantry? Does our fate depend on the happy solution of some petty enigma or childish conundrum, even as our salvation, in most of the so-called revealed religious, is settled by a blind and stupid cast of the die? Is all the liberty that we are granted reduced to the reading of a more or less ingenious riddle? Can the great soul of the universe ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Chaumette and his friends had celebrated in the winter. The energumens of the Goddess of Reason had now been some weeks in their bloody graves; by this time, if they had given the wrong answer to the supreme enigma, their eyes would perhaps be opened. Robespierre persuaded the Convention to decree an official recognition of the Supreme Being, and to attend a commemorative festival in honour of their mystic patron. He contrived to be chosen president for the decade in which the festival would fall. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... it, or how do you prepare it? are some of the questions asked me now and again. To the general public there seems to be some great mystery surrounding this spawn question; in fact, it appears to be the chief enigma connected with mushroom-growing. Now, the truth is, there is no mystery at all about the matter. What practical mushroom growers call spawn, botanists ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer: but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gilman's house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... had evidently no aspirations for martyrdom; he fathered the idea upon a rabbi of a previous generation, and, having veiled his statement in an enigma, added the caution, "Let him who understands ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... of lightning the true explanation of the Minerva's visit stood clearly revealed to Leslie's mind. That one word "caves," spoken as it was in tones of mingled excitement and anxiety, ill-suppressed, had furnished him with the key to the entire enigma. Caves! Yes, of course; that was it; that explained everything—or very nearly everything—that had thus far been puzzling Leslie, and gave him practically all the information that he had been so anxious ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... faces were turned to him as though he must be solver of the enigma. He could not be unconscious of this mute eye-questioning, and it disturbed his resolute air of composure. He hesitated, glanced towards his mother, the house-mistress, then back at the frightened folk, and gravely, before them all, made the sign of the cross. There was a flutter of hands as ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... supposed, within the sanctity of his tent, longing for an order to take him elsewhere, and dreading the possibility of again having to encounter this girl, who remained to him so perplexing an enigma. Glencaid meanwhile recovered from its mania of lynch-law, and even began exhibiting some faint evidences of shame over what was so plainly a mistake. And the populace were also beginning to exhibit no small degree of interest ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... progress hitherto made in the settlement of a large share of the State, is an enigma to those not versed in our early history. While occupying the position of a dependent of the central power at Washington, we were so unfortunate in some instances as to have men placed over us with whom personal interests were paramount to the great interests of the territory, which, ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... from domestic policy. They are so large as to be inside as well as outside the state. From an English standpoint the most obvious example is the Irish; for the Irish problem is not a British problem, but also an American problem. And this is true even of the great external enigma of Japan. The Japanese question may be a part of foreign policy for America, but it is a part of domestic policy for California. And the same is true of that other intense and intelligent Eastern people, the genius and limitations of which have troubled the world so much longer. What the Japs are ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... him on the old footing. Being endowed by nature with a romantic imagination, I had become attached more than all the others to the man whose life was an enigma, and who seemed to me the hero of some mysterious drama. He was fond of me; at least, with me alone did he drop his customary sarcastic tone, and converse on different subjects in a simple and unusually agreeable manner. But after this unlucky evening, the thought that his ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... else but the beauty of one who died young because the gods loved him. But when we question those wonderful mute features and beg them for their secret, they return no answer. There is not even a smile upon the parted lips. So profound is the mystery, so insoluble the enigma, that from its most importunate interrogation we derive nothing but an attitude of deeper reverence. This in itself, however, is ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... What an enigma the Tennessee warbler for a long time remained to me! Never still for a moment, yet so indistinctly marked that at a distance it looks like a dozen other birds one might name—a veritable feathered rebus. But finally I fixed its place in the avian schedule with the help of my ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... defined boundaries. The problem has become more precise, both as to variation and as to heredity. The inner conditions of life have in both respects shown a greater independence than Darwin had supposed in his theory, though he always admitted that the cause of variation was to him a great enigma, "a most perplexing problem," and that the struggle for life could only occur where variation existed. But, at any rate, it was of the greatest importance that Darwin gave a living impression of the struggle for life which is everywhere going ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... is the supposed inventor of Palindromic verses (see Mr. Sands' Specimens of Macaronic Poetry, p. 5., 1831. His enigma on "Madam" was written by Miss Ritson ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... all the powers of earth and heaven, there's no madness like dealing with an animated enigma! What is it you ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... garments worn by his customer, which, having only a few months before emanated from the establishment of a well-known London cutter, presented a considerable contrast to the new investment; he even ventured upon some remarks which evidently had for their object the elucidation of the enigma, but a word that such clothes as those worn by me were utterly un suited to the bush repelled all further questioning-indeed, so pleased did the noor fellow appear in a pecuniary point of view, that he insisted upon presenting ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... an enigma to most, but if I know his type, he is not a little dangerous. He can be exceedingly rude. I passed him on my way here and common politeness should have made him pull up for a word or two. But he rushed by in a cloud of dust with two fingers just touching the brim of ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... currency, until 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 man's odd ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... estimated to have expended two and a half millions of dollars upon the buildings constituting the refining establishment of Regla, which goes under the general designation of the patio. Why his walls were built so thick, or why so many massive arches should have been constructed, is an enigma to the present generation, as they could by no means have been intended for a ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... action of his life, has persecuted me with a minute anxiety, with an ever increasing activity, with an inflexible rudeness; and my connections with him contributed to make him known to me, long before Europe had discovered the key of the enigma. ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... general enigma running through the whole of Mr. Burke's book. He writes in a rage against the National Assembly; but what is he enraged about? If his assertions were as true as they are groundless, and that France by her Revolution, had annihilated her power, and become what he calls a chasm, it might ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... nor is there any now, who, so far as French war stories and personal anecdotes of the period from Marengo to Waterloo are concerned, would have been in any sense of the word qualified to enter into competition with him. Where he got all his material is an enigma to me. The only explanation I can offer is that he had in his memory a pigeonhole, into which fell naturally everything he found that appealed to his passion, in his constant reading ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... has sought an answer to the enigma of the criminal. The writings of the European criminologists run the gamut of explanation from Lombroso, who explained crime as an inborn tendency of the criminal, to Tarde, who defines the criminal as a purely ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... indictment, however, of the present age of mechanical power is that it has largely destroyed the spirit of work. The great enigma which it propounds to us, and which, like the riddle of the Sphinx, we will solve or ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... foal of a week old could not have pressed itself through the opening; and how the single grinder, evidently no recent introduction into the cave, could have got mixed up in the straw with the human bones, seemed an enigma somewhat of the class to which the reel in the bottle belongs. I found in Edinburgh an unexpected commentator on the mystery, in the person of my little boy,—an experimental philosopher in his second year. I had spread out on the floor the curiosities of Eigg,—among ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... and to conceal which she became daily more self-contained. Her reserve was like a barrier about her. She was sweet and gentle to all around her, but a little aloof and very silent. To the other girls she had been a heroine of romance, puzzling mystery surrounded her; to the Nuns an enigma. The Mother Superior, alone, had arrived at a partial understanding, more than that even she could not accomplish. Gillian loved her, but her reserve was stronger than her love. Sitting now in the dainty English bedroom, revelling in the warm beauty of the exquisite landscape that, mellowed ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... gathering!" thought Pascal Ferailleur. "What singular people!" And he turned his attention to the mistress of the house, as if he hoped to decipher the solution of the enigma on her face. ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... his sister, found that she too hung upon Hood's words. Her presence in the house still presented an enigma with which his imagination struggled futilely, but no opportunity seemed likely to offer for an exchange ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... The enigma pressed upon her days, she lived in the heaviness of it, waiting. His silence adding itself up, brought her a kind of shame for the exertions she had made. She turned with obstinacy from the further schemes her ingenuity presented. Out of the sum of her ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... friend, that he had never really loved her and at the same time awoke in Noemi an intellectual curiosity, which, though she struggled against it, was always returning—a curiosity to know if that man would have loved her better than Jeanne. She replied that Maironi's character was an enigma to her. And his intellect? His culture? She could say nothing concerning either his intellect or his culture, but if such a woman as Jeanne Dessalle had loved him so devotedly, he must certainly be both intelligent and cultured. And his former religious ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... regret; to attain to the unattainable, the point of self-annihilation where all distinction between subject and object, something and nothing, disappears, it is necessary to be a child: to be born again. Rebirth! the key to the enigma of unhappiness ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... for a moment, as if seeking to unravel some enigma, then she smiled and shook her head with a little fugitive shadow of melancholy in ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... deeply, disturbing her maiden serenity, and awaking for the first time the woman within her heart. Hitherto her girlhood's fancies had been like summer zephyrs, disturbing but briefly the still, clear waters of her soul; but now she became an enigma to herself as she slowly grew conscious of her own heart and the law of her woman's nature to love and give herself to another. But she had too much of the doughty old major's fire and spirit, and was too fond of her freedom, to surrender easily. Both ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... behold, there was—what think you?—the cat, pawing away, first with her fore feet, and then with her hind; now touching one note gently, and then dancing with all fours across the keys. There was a solution of the enigma—a bringing to light ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... wind had become fair. Then, indeed, he departed, after taking leave of the Pathfinder, in the manner of one who believed he was in company of a distinguished character for the last time. The two separated like those who respect one another, while each felt that the other was all enigma ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... sous-entendu of nature: she could be a wife, she could not be a mother. These are the two mysteries we must respect, but which we must know to have been the secret of the entire life of Mme. Recamier—a mournful and eternal enigma which will never have its words divined,... All her looks produced an intoxication, but brought hope to no heart. The divine statue had not descended from its pedestal for anyone, as though such a performance would have been too divine for a mortal." Her ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... the Seasons go, With store of good and ill; Do all men find you cold as snow, And unresponsive still? O beautiful enigma, say, Will love's sublime persistence Solve for you, in the usual way, The ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... shade, (with big white umbrellas over them to keep the freckles off,) were puzzling their heads over charades and enigmas, instead of running around and making little Frou-Frous of themselves. Mr. P. composed an enigma for a group of these ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870 • Various
... a very strange subject—it is all an enigma!" said Evelyn, shaking her wise little head with a pretty gravity, half mock, half real. "Ah, if Lord Vargrave should love you—and you—oh, you would love him, and then I should ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book I • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and complexities. The testimony of Papias remains an enigma that can only be solved—if ever it is solved—by close and detailed investigations. I am bound in candour to say that, so far as I can see myself at present, I am inclined to agree with the author of 'Supernatural Religion' against his critics [Endnote 159:1], that the works to which Papias alludes ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... slowed down before the gate—"I will see her to-morrow and perhaps learn a little more about her—if there is anything to learn. If not—well, women love to appear mysterious. There never was a woman yet who didn't long to rival the Sphinx and appear an enigma in the eyes ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... with a painful incredulity. The fact was that, besides the singular character which Peytel's appearance, attitude, and talk had worn ever since the event, there was in his narrative an inexplicable enigma; its contradictions and impossibilities were such, that calm persons were revolted at it, and that even friendship itself ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... worth had happiness, joy and gladness, Those links of love in its purest scope, If, when they sever, in gloomy sadness, You could not join them by rays of hope? What then were life? But a mental stigma, An empty strife, An unsolved enigma! A heartless, cruel, Uriah note, Which God, in ...
— The Angel of Death • Johan Olof Wallin
... So this was the explanation of the Monny puzzle! Yet it was but the first word of another enigma. Who was responsible for the wild story? There was more than met the eye—or ear—in this. I could hardly believe that Monny would have chosen, or Rachel dared, to start this rumour, though it might have amused the real heiress, and suited ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... contrasted light and shade, were made available, in order to set the apparent miracle in the strongest attitude of opposition to ordinary facts. In the case of the Veiled Lady, moreover, the interest of the spectator was further wrought up by the enigma of her identity, and an absurd rumor (probably set afloat by the exhibitor, and at one time very prevalent) that a beautiful young lady, of family and fortune, was enshrouded within the misty drapery of the veil. It was white, with somewhat of a subdued silver sheen, like the sunny side of ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... move was an enigma, for he set the men to cutting and trimming tall sapling poles. To these were tied (how reverently!) the twenty stands of colors which loving Creole hands had stitched. The boisterous day was reddening ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... effort to know,—the faith that the world is an intelligible structure, meant to be penetrated by the thought of man. Can it be that nature is an "open secret," but that man, and he alone, must remain an enigma? Or does he not rather bear within himself the key to every problem which he solves, and is it not his thought which penetrates the secrets of nature? The success of science, in reducing to law the most varied ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... Dutchman," is founded on a similar appearance at the Cape of Good Hope, connected with a tradition which has been long current there among the Dutch colonists. Another instance is afforded by the chimaera, the solution of which enigma, as given by Ovid, is so fully substantiated by the very intelligent British officer who surveyed the Caramania a few years since. Scylla the sea monster, which devoured six of the rowers of Ulysses, M. Salverte, a recent compiler on the marvellous, is tempted to regard as an overgrown ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... is harmful. This taboo and the reasons for it are a complete enigma unless the primitive people had observed the evils of close inbreeding. Inbreeding maintains the excellence of a breed at the expense of its vigor. Outbreeding (unless too far out) develops vigor at the expense of the characteristic traits. It is ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... to marvel over this strange fact. She had come to realise that Nick was, and always must be, an enigma to her. In the middle of July, when the heat was so intense as to be almost intolerable, Daisy received a pressing invitation to visit an old friend, and to go yachting on the Broads. She refused it at first point-blank; but ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... desire must be gratified in physical life. It would seem more practical not to deceive one's self by the sham of stoicism, not to attempt renunciation of that with which nothing would induce one to part. Would it not be a bolder policy, a more promising mode of solving the great enigma of existence, to grasp it, to take hold firmly and to demand of it the mystery of itself? If men will but pause and consider what lessons they have learned from pleasure and pain, much might be guessed of that strange thing which ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... the eyes of the world, and fills the home where it enters with untold misery; but a theocratic government, thoroughly equipped, unanimously responsive in all its branches, far-reaching in its designs and expanding as rapidly as that of the Mormon church, presents a great political enigma to the American people even when shorn of its most obnoxious feature. Congress and the country at large have their attention fixed upon the question of polygamy, and the proposed legislative commission, if endorsed by Congress, would bring the Mormon Church itself face ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... depict the Philippine native character, but with only partial success. Dealing with such an enigma, the most eminent physiognomists would surely differ in their speculations regarding the Philippine native of the present day. That Catonian figure, with placid countenance and solemn gravity of feature, would readily ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... was concealed. Traill's heart warmed to her. He knew his sister through and through—guessed every thought that was taking shape in her mind. But Sally—even her presence there alone—was more or less of an enigma and, seeing her almost pathetic perturbation of manner, he paid all the attentions he roughly ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... is an enigma, whose import no man as yet may fully know. She is a germ of boundless things. The unfolded bud excites the hope of one-half the human race, while it stirs the remainder with both anger and alarm. Who shall now paint the beauty and attraction of ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... became known that he wanted to escape observation the more was curiosity aroused to see him, so that a considerable part of his life was spent in adopting stratagems to prevent sight-seers from catching a glimpse of the aristocratic enigma. ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... made a token show of interest; he twice lost his temper in boast against boast, but he was more often a blunt enigma. He saw much and said little. Those times when he did speak, so extravagant were his grunt and gesture that much ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... had not come, but a gloom left her. She could not but believe that utterance. Whatever enigma might lie in the shadow on the blind, it was not an enigma ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... the mouth somewhat deepened, there had been no outward change.... And this once was she! I thought, Where is she, then? Where is the soul? Where is that which loved me without understanding me? Where is that which I loved? The baffling, sad enigma of death confronted me in all its terrifying crudity. The shaft of love and the desolation of death had struck me almost in the same hour, and before these twin mysteries, supremely equal, I recoiled and quailed. I had neither faith nor friend. I was solitary, ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... in her reply a curious confirmation of the familiar saying, that no man can ever comprehend a woman. A long life's experience has convinced me that the simplest and most direct of her sex must be, in the inner workings of her mind, an enigma to the wisest man that ever existed; so impressed am I with this fact that several times in the course of this narrative I have been at pains to disavow all knowledge of why the women folk of my tale did this or that, ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... identical with ours, was much closer than the tortured dialect of the Eastenders of the Isle of Wight. The longer I talked with her the more hopeful I became of finding here, among her people, some records, or traditions, which might assist in clearing up the historic enigma of the past two centuries. I asked her if we were far from the city of London, but she did not know what I meant. When I tried to explain, describing mighty buildings of stone and brick, broad avenues, parks, palaces, and countless people, she ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... something of an enigma to Hector Strong. He was making more than a million pounds a year, and yet she did not want to marry him. Sometimes he wondered if the woman were quite sane. Yet, mad ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... word of advice. Never try to get a detective to do anything for you unless you are willing to tell him all you know and all you suspect. It is generally hard enough to solve an enigma without having other mysteries attached ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... statements, that the remains of the mammoth and hyaena were identical in appearance, colour, and chemical condition with those of the bear and other associated fossil animals, none of which exhibited signs of having been previously enveloped in any dissimilar matrix. Another enigma which led Schmerling astray in some of his geological speculations was the supposed presence of the agouti, a South American rodent, "proper to the torrid zone." My friend M. Lartet, guided by Schmerling's figures of the teeth of this species, suggests, and I have little ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... ALEXANDRIA.—In Joann. Evang., 1. ii., c. 5: "For those things which are spoken concerning it [the Divine Nature] are not spoken as they are in very truth, but as the tongue of man can interpret, and as man can hear; for he who sees in an enigma also ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... former, man is not to prevent his time: Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem; wherein nevertheless there seemeth to be a liberty granted, as far forth as the polishing of this glass, or some moderate explication of this enigma. But to press too far into it cannot but cause a dissolution and overthrow of the spirit of man. For in the body there are three degrees of that we receive into it—aliment, medicine, and poison; whereof aliment is that which the nature of ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... an end, their last echo dying out with The Echo which I wrote at Darjeeling. This apparently proved such an abstruse affair that two friends laid a wager as to its real meaning. My only consolation was that, as I was equally unable to explain the enigma to them when they came to me for a solution, neither of them had to lose any money over it. Alas! The days when I wrote excessively plain poems about The Lotus and A Lake had ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... somewhat the appearance of a gigantic fork accidentally twisted. Accordingly its illustrious sponsor offered it to the world as an irregular quadrumane. I believe so, indeed! This quadrumane without hands—this edentate whose molars are preceded by magnificent canines—this enigma of nature, created for the confusion and despair of all classification—does, I must in all humility confess, completely upset the rule I laid down so stringently when speaking of the horse, as to the objects ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... The enigma of Miss Aldclyffe's mistake was solved. 'O, was it?' said Cytherea. 'Ah, I remember Mrs. Jackson, the lodging-house keeper at Budmouth, labelled them. We spell our name G, R, ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... the once dashing soldier increased daily, and as it could be traced to no definite cause, he gradually became a physiological enigma; and thence naturally a pet of the medical profession. Not that he was a profitable patient, for the necessities of the family were too great to allow of so expensive a luxury as a doctor's bill; but ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... that now and kiss me on to fortune! I should be double-souled and inspired. A few months, and Madame la Vicomtesse should 'walk in silk attire.' I flame at the picture. Why will your father not yield you gracefully, instead of plying us with that eternal enigma of ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... comforts. Prices are risen enormously, house-rent doubled within the last five or six years; all articles of luxury are very much dearer; the very gloves I wear cost twenty per cent more than I used to pay for gloves of the same quality. How the people we meet live, and live so well, is an enigma that would defy AEdipus if AEdipus were not a Parisian. But the main explanation is this: speculation and commerce, with the facilities given to all investments, have really opened more numerous and more rapid ways to fortune than were known a few ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... some misty way he wondered why this woman, with her splendid hair and scorching eyes, should have upbraided the tetrarch and abused the procurator because of the friendless Galilean whom he was leading to the cross. Woman to him, however, was, as she has been to others wiser than he, an enigma he failed to solve. And so he nodded merely, not unkindly, and smiled in ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... thought he could see the hopelessness of staying longer. "A woman's love," he said, gloomily, "is a wonderful thing. It clings through trouble and tragedy—never faltering." She looked at him, startled, trying to solve the enigma of this speech. He laughed, bitterly. "That's what makes a woman superior to mere man. Love exalts her. It makes a savage of a man. I suppose it is 'good-bye.'" He held out a hand to her and she took it, holding it limply, looking at him in wonderment, her ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... solution should not present itself till November of 1849. That is true; it seems odd, but still it is possible, that we, in anno domini 1849, may see further through a mile-stone than oedipus, the king, in the year B. c. twelve or thirteen hundred. The long interval between the enigma and its answer may remind the reader of an old story in Joe Miller, where a traveller, apparently an inquisitive person, in passing-through a toll-bar, said to the keeper, "How do you like your eggs ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... stories, of which The Goldbug is one, in which an impenetrable enigma is first presented, to be solved afterwards as by a talisman; but, then, a lesson in cryptography ensues, wherein the talisman is explained away, and the miraculous gives place to the reasoning faculties of a mind ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... repairs of the harbour; they does all the rough and dirty jobs as is to be done about the works and place—indeed, we calls 'em the Port Admiral's skippers." I now fully understood the import of the term Portsmouth Greys, which had before been an enigma to 183me; and comprehended that the unhappy ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... great enigma of Art History,—you must not follow Art without pleasure, nor must you follow it for the sake of pleasure. And the solution of that enigma is simply this fact; that wherever Art has been followed only for the sake of luxury or delight, it has contributed, and largely contributed, to ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... excess with any real merits in that work. This novel is in its own nature and purpose sufficiently obscure; and the commentaries which have been written upon it by the Hurnboldts, Schlegels, &c., make the enigma still more enigmatical. We shall not venture abroad upon an ocean of discussion so truly dark, and at the same time so illimitable. Whether it be qualified to excite any deep and sincere feeling of one kind or another in the German mind,—in a mind ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... jealousy of some woman he really loves, and he will cultivate your friendship merely to distinguish himself in her eyes by rejecting you. I can not tell you how many motives, there are so many. The human heart is an insolvable enigma. It is a whimsical combination of all the known contrarieties. We think we know its workings; we see their effects; we ignore the cause. If it expresses its sentiments sincerely, even that sincerity is not reassuring. Perhaps its movements spring ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... good deal on his own powers of influence. Life had been to him so far one long social success of the best kind. Very likely as he walked on to the great house over whose threshold lay the answer to the enigma of months, his mind gradually filled with some naive young dream of winning the squire, playing him with all sorts of honest arts, beguiling him ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... content to associate with men whose chief recommendation is the profuseness with which they pander to his vanity, and to seek personal distinction and power by lending himself to the promotion of schemes the success of which no man would more earnestly deprecate than himself. The greatest enigma is how Durham has ever come to be considered of such importance, and what is the cause of the sort of reputation he has acquired; for whatever may be his intrinsic value, he certainly fills a considerable ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... with her figure and her dress. Only in certain women at a certain age is it given to put language into their attitude. Is it sorrow, is it happiness that gives to the woman of thirty, to the happy or unhappy woman, the secret of this eloquence of carriage? This will always be an enigma which each interprets by the aid of his hopes, desires, or theories. The way in which she leaned both elbows on the arm of her chair, the toying of her inter-clasped fingers, the curve of her throat, the ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... Fontenelle who ever got hold of my secret. Fontenelle was in the habit of dining frequently with me; one day, finding me in tears, he was so surprised, he who never wept himself, from philosophy, doubtless, that he tormented me for more than an hour for a solution of the enigma. He was almost like a woman; he drew from me, by his cat-like worrying, the history of my love. Would you believe it? I hoped to touch his heart, but it was like speaking to the deaf. After having listened to the end without saying a word, he muttered with ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... at Florence: the title is La Sfinge Enimmi del Signor Antonio Malatesti. Commendatory verses are prefixed by Chimentelli, Coltellini, and Galileo Galilei. The last, from the celebrity of the writer, may deserve the small space it will occupy in your pages. It is itself an enigma: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... love Emily Brunell. Whatever her father is, or has done, she is guiltless of any complicity, and I can't stand by and see her suffer, much less be the one to precipitate her grief by bringing her father to justice. I told you the truth when I said that the cipher letter was an enigma to me. I could not solve the cryptogram, nor will I be the means of bringing it to the hands of those who might solve it. I don't want any further connection with the case; in fact, sir, I want to ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... plays upon every feature. The method of the Portraits—again we cite the author's own language—is "descriptive, analytical, inquisitive." We are led along through a series of details, each lightly touched, each contributing to the elucidation of the enigma, by a train of closely linked and subtile observation, which penetrates all the obscurities, unravels all the intricacies, of the subject. And the result is, not that broad but mingled conception which arises from personal intimacy or from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... so pretty frequently during the last twenty-four hours—to the smirking self-conscious little house on the verge of Barnes Common. Unpromising though it had appeared outwardly, yet within it he believed he had found a friend—a friend who was also an enigma. Perhaps, as he now reflected, all women are enigmas. Certainly they are amazingly different. He thought of Poppy. He looked at Serena. Yes, doubtless they all are enigmas; only—might Heaven forgive him the discourtesy—all ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... translation by Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda. This Krishna of the Gita is clearly quite different in character from the Krishna of the milkmaids and, without some effort at reconciliation, the two must obviously present a baffling enigma. Indeed so great is the contrast that many Englishmen, entranced by the lover, might be astonished to hear of a more didactic role, while those who value the Gita might easily be disturbed on finding its author so daringly ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... Swift. The nature of Voltaire was, indeed, not inhuman; but he venerated nothing. Neither in the masterpieces of art nor in the purest examples of virtue, neither in the Great First Cause nor in the awful enigma of the grave, could he see anything but subjects for drollery. The more solemn and august the theme, the more monkey-like was his grimacing and chattering. The mirth of Swift is the mirth of Mephistopheles; the mirth of Voltaire is the mirth of Puck. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... he had at different times been on a friendly footing had rapidly grown cool to him after the first moment of closer intimacy, and had of their own impulse made haste to get away from him... and so he had at last schooled himself to remain an enigma, and to scorn what destiny had denied him.... This is, I fancy, the only sort of scorn people in general do feel. No sort of frank, spontaneous, that is to say good, demonstration of passion suited Lutchkov; he was bound to keep a continual ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... In the whole of the time before this no one had ventured to raise seriously the question of the origin of species, which is the culminating point of phylogeny. On all sides it was regarded as an insoluble enigma. ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... moments of terror and in the face of the enigma of their unexplained visitor, was impossible. Also the light in the bedroom did not induce slumber, although both girls found it agreeable. Their door leading out into the corridor was now securely latched, notwithstanding that Betty ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... here and there, on my periodical journeyings to the States. Kind friends supply me with English books and papers; the excellent Sir Herbert Street sends me more than I can possibly digest! I confess that much of what I read was an enigma to me till I had studied the Bible. Its teachings seem to have filtered, warm and fluid, through the veins of your national and private life. Then, slowly, they froze hard, congealing the whole body into a kind ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... this fact: the native has been fed with this stuff for centuries, and if we desire to enter into his feelings, we must feed ourselves likewise—up to a point. The past is the key to the present. That is why I have dwelt at such length on the subject—in the hope of clearing up the enigma in the national character: the unpassable gulf, I mean, between the believing and the unbelieving sections ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... should always be so well dressed that his dress shall never be observed at all. Does this sound like an enigma? It is not meant for one. It only implies that perfect simplicity is perfect elegance, and that the true test of taste in the toilette of a gentleman is its entire harmony, unobtrusiveness and becomingness. If any friend should say to you, "What a handsome ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... beards and skimpy rags of clothing, were setting upon an unclassifiable creature that snarled and fought back. It was erect and coarsely hairy—Parr saw that much before the enigma gave up the unequal fight and ran clumsily away into a mass of bright-flowered scrub. Execrations and a volley of sticks and stones speeded ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... the book, drawn by the aptness of the text to my problem. Had Maupassant given me the key of the whole enigma? Was this astonishing genius, who had so wrought upon our imaginations, was he a criminal irresistibly driven to tell us the story of his evil life? Were the police of Europe and America even now scouring the surface of the globe for him? That brother, that dare-devil gentleman of the painter-cousin's ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... thy coming Along the moss-grown path of stones— Those agonies that time has built on my soul— By the unfathomable lake of my tears Shed when even prayers had failed To bring thy returning. Come, destroyer of my peace and sleep, Plunderer of lights of my days! Enigma on the scroll of my fate Before the lightnings fired my tower And thunders crashed in my life's sky. Only send the echo of thy footfalls— The ring of thy song, And a star—reflection of thy smile— Those million suns in the ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... my head. The enigma baffled me. Our suspicions regarding the honesty of Leith made the strange appearance of the figure on the table of stone more perplexing than it would have been under ordinary circumstances. Leith had asserted that the island was uninhabited, yet we were not inclined to rush to him with the ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... for the woman did not hinder him from thinking of life. He did not philosophize about this enigma, which was already stirring a feeling of alarm in his heart; he was not able to argue, but he began to listen attentively to everything that men said of life, and he tried to remember their words. They did not make anything clear to him; ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... at every hour of our common day, are surrounded by this unthinkable thing, space without end, is an eternal reminder that the forms, shapes and events of habitual occurrence, which we are inclined to take so easily for granted, are part of a staggering and inscrutable enigma. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... Second Part, when much of the impulse had gone and all the deliberation in the world was not active enough to replace it. Helen has her share, among other abstractions, but the breath has not returned into her body, she is glacial, a talking enigma, to whom Marlowe's Faustus would never have said with ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... free, I had been living these twelve months in the day when the last line should be written. Now all to be recommenced from the wearying, sickening beginning. And why? Why had he done it? That I could not understand. As a psychological enigma it leapt fitfully before my brain between the spasms of personal desperation. He had nothing to gain, everything to lose by my failure. He knew I was a man to always do the utmost for my friend, simply because he was my friend, and therefore from any ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... father living on the edge of the park, little more than a thousand yards from the chateau; and I knew no harm of him. Still, I knew little; and for that reason was forward to believe that there, rather than in my own household, lay the key to the enigma. ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... terrible man was no ignorant clod, such as one would inevitably suppose him to be from his exhibitions of brutality. At once he became an enigma. One side or the other of his nature was perfectly comprehensible; but both sides together were bewildering. I had already remarked that his language was excellent, marred with an occasional slight inaccuracy. ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... For if poor Sabine was a woman he had known, he had known nothing of her: she had always remained for him a phantom of his heart. Ada took upon herself to make him make up for lost time. In his turn he tried to solve the riddle of woman; an enigma which perhaps is no enigma except for those who seek some ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... will reunite them. And then he doubts. . . . She is watching him; she turns at last toward the door, hesitates, and then walks slowly out. When she has gone he takes up the torn leaf from the calendar, and holds it in his hands, looking at it with the air of a man confronted by an unsolvable enigma. ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... of writers; such habits of diligence and productiveness were immediately manifested throughout the whole nation; and such a mass of respectable talent was brought to light; that the long interval of a dull and deathlike silence, which preceded this period, presents indeed an enigma difficult to be solved. No small influence may be ascribed to Germany. The principles of the government were changed; the country, physically as well as morally exhausted, could recover but gradually; but all this could not create talents where there were none; nor could all external oppression ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... an elk would never be caught without greyhounds until he had run fifteen or twenty miles. The dense jungles fatigue him as he ploughs his way through them, and thus forms a path for the dogs behind him. How he can move in some of these jungles is an enigma; a horse would break his legs, and, in fact, could not stir in places through which an elk passes in ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... though circumscribed depressions on a wide platform, and left mere gorges at the openings, through which the whole vast amount of triturated matter must have been carried away? The only light I can throw upon this enigma, is by remarking that banks of the most irregular forms appear to be now forming in some seas, as in parts of the West Indies and in the Red Sea, and that their sides are exceedingly steep. Such banks, I have been led ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... all astonishment. He interpreted my look, and said—"To solve the enigma at once, It is our wish to send you ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... Though rudely formed, it was of stone, and not of wood, like most of those in such places, and a short inscription was carved upon it. Faintly cut, badly spelt, and with many abbreviations, it was an enigma to her scholarship, and L'Isle had to decipher it for her: "Andreo Savaro was murdered here. Pray for his soul." "It is only one of those monumental crosses," said he, "of which you see so many along the roads throughout ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... nothing but the military costume in which she stood, not any woman's linen, not even one chemise. For a change she took the captain's shirt. Such a state of things was so new to me that the situation seemed to me a complete enigma. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... performance of; to explain the difference between Matter and Spirit, to unravel the perplexities of Necessity and Free-will; to show us the true grounds of our belief in God, and what hope nature gives us of the soul's immortality; and thus at length, after a thousand failures, to interpret the enigma of our being,—hardly needed that additional inducement to make such a man as Schiller grasp at it with eager curiosity. His progress also was facilitated by his present circumstances; Jena had now become ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... his words. Was he at last going to find out the truth? Was he going to solve this enigma and discover the name of his family, the land of his birth? Truly the scene appeared to him almost chimerical. He fastened his eyes upon the wounded man, ready to drink in his words with avidity. For nothing in the world would he have interfered with his recital, neither by interruption nor gesture. ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... to say, my thoughts were busy on an enigma that might not interest him, namely, why a young officer near him kept rubbing a meditative chin with a fugitive finger, and why that finger came down so swiftly when the C.O.'s eyes were turned towards the young man. I replied to the ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... enigma in regard to FATALITY, men err in conceiving that all the remote causes which lead to an event, operate and combine for the sake of some particular result, instead of considering every personal or social event as the necessary single ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will. So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe's PRINCIPLE, and to possess it is, after a fashion, to possess the universe itself. 'God,' 'Matter,' 'Reason,' 'the Absolute,' 'Energy,' ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... became the scene of ablutions, arrayings and bedizenings curiously elaborate. To me it was, and ever must be an enigma, how they contrived to spend so much time in doing so little. The operation seemed close, intricate, prolonged: the result simple. A clear white muslin dress, a blue sash (the Virgin's colours), a pair of white, or straw-colour kid ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... found this latter thought disturbing and distasteful. It was long past midnight before she could dismiss the enigma from her thoughts and ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... the right hand upon the cheek, as he had seen the soldier do. In answer the youth simply looked toward the twelve, waving his hand towards us in a way which seemed to say to them, "Gentlemen, behold the enigma!" Then, beginning with the eldest, the twelve jabbered at us in turn, apparently in different tongues, some sibilant, some guttural, and others with the musical cadence of frequent vowel sounds. Needless to say, each was equally incomprehensible ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... sir. What it can mean is not easily discovered: if mail for a packet or bag was a word then in use, no salve in the mail may mean, no salve in the mountebank's budget. Or shall we read, no enigma, no riddle, no l'envoy—in the vale, sir—O, sir. plantain. The matter is not great, but one would wish for some meaning ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson |
