"Puzzle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an ethical scheme clearing up on principles of poetic justice the most perplexed and awful problems in the world, it throws streams of light through the abysses of evil, gives dramatic solution to many a puzzle, and, abstractly considered, charms the understanding and the conscience. As a philosophical dogma answering to some strange, vague passages in human nature and experience, it echoes with dreamy sweetness through the deep mystic chambers of our being. As the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... a strange puzzle to the Ion children: no blessing asked at the table, no gathering of the family morning or evening for prayer or praise or the reading of ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... Val. "That shows our man to be industriously at his task. No, no explanation now; on the twenty-seventh of May we'll come again, and the drain itself shall furnish a solution to the puzzle." ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... world were at their wits' end; scientists threw up their hands in despair. The Plague was an insoluble puzzle—enigmatical, utterly inexplicable, beyond the knowledge ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... first sat down. Nowhere could I discern a single ray of light. Then in came Mirpah, and when she begged of me to tell her the story, I was glad to do so, remembering how often she had helped me through a puzzle in days gone by—but none of them of such magnitude as this one. So I told her everything as far as it was known to myself. After that we discussed the whole case carefully step by step. The immediate result of this ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... there used to be. And my ancestors, some of them, were Salem people. That may be where I get my taste for divination and solving problems. I just love puzzles of all sorts, and if the old Cromarty gentleman had only left a cipher message, it would have been fun to puzzle it out." ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... told. He could not imagine Edith making him the confidant of her outraged feelings. Besides, would such a strangely impassive person resent any little indiscretion in which his wife might choose to indulge? Kirk did not know—the man was a puzzle to him. ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... such as cats and rats, learn how to manipulate puzzle-boxes and how to get at the treasure at the heart of a Hampton Court maze. Some of the puzzle-boxes, with a reward of food inside, are quite difficult, for the various bolts and bars have to be dealt with in a particular order, and yet many mammals master the problem. ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... he had brought home solid comforts, useful facts, wholesome sentiments, natural manners, and sensible, but modest conversation,—instead of an astonishing variety of intellectual curiosities and intricate moral toys, whereat plain people marvelled—as in the case of a certain ingenious Chinese puzzle, ball within ball, all save the last elaborately carved—how the very diminutive plain one at the centre ever got in there, or ever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... after the manner of the Egyptian obelisks. The slender round towers of Brechin and Abernethy, and of Devenish and other places in Ireland, capped by a conical stone roof terminating in a single stone, which were for a long time a puzzle to the antiquary, are now ascertained to be simply steeples connected with Christian churches of the tenth and eleventh centuries. And just as these towers are now left isolated and solitary without a trace of the buildings with which they were associated, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... ocean. There are extensive stables, and to them are attached a fine tennis-court and riding-house, both constantly used by the younger Russells. Beyond is a Chinese dairy kept for show, and in a distant part of the grounds a curious puzzle-garden and rustic grotto. Woburn Park is one of the largest private enclosures in England, covering thirty-five hundred acres, and enclosed by a brick wall twelve miles long and eight feet high. It is undulating in surface, containing several pretty lakes and a large herd of deer. Its ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... guess how she enjoyed the lawn with its roses, and the beautiful river. Fresh from the poor little cabin on the hill-top, she nevertheless fell with the greatest ease into the ways and habits of her new life. It did not puzzle or disturb her in the least to live in large rooms, be waited on by servants, or have nice things about her; she took to all these naturally. For a few days Mr. and Mrs. Grant watched with some anxiety, fearing to discover a flaw in their treasure, ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... numerous boils upon his skin has often been a puzzle to his physician, who has in vain attempted to find some cause for the trouble in the general health alone. Had he known that every boil owed its origin to pus bacteria, which had infected a sweat gland or hair follicle, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... young man," said he, "say nothing of my trade in tin, for I see these are men of quality, and, having heard of me only through the newspapers, know but little of my true history. But, let my enemies say what they will, I am not a man to stand at trifles. Honors never puzzle me: it's the thickness of them. I say, though, that when fame puts a man on the pedestal he must never think of falling to the ground, for that would be a fear unworthy my profession." He now read and reread the commodore's letter, and at length ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... first saw thee, my mind laboured with a strong puzzle, whether I should put thee down for a great fool, or a smatterer in wit. Something I saw was wrong in thee, by thy dress. If this fellow, thought I, delights not so much in ridicule, that he will not spare himself, he must be plaguy ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... arise those pseudo-conceptions which we call the infinitely extended and the infinitely lasting. Under our present limitations it is impossible for us to grasp the whole of any Truth, if we could do that, there would be no such mystery of Infinity to puzzle us; we could, as it were, see all around it, but that is again looking through another window. We are now considering relativity. If we cut off the very end of the point of the finest needle, we get so minute a particle of steel that it is hardly ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... herself, could not imagine why the exclusive Eleanor should choose to exhibit a freakish tendency toward philanthropy in this one direction. Beatrice would have liked, for the satisfaction there is in solving a puzzle, to get at the root of the matter. Accordingly she always took pains to draw ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... Synne is given in Specimens of Early English, Part II, most of which can be read with ease. The obsolete words are not very numerous, and we meet now and then with half a dozen consecutive lines that would puzzle no one. It is needless to pursue the history of this dialect further. It had, by this time, become almost the standard language, differing from Modern English chiefly in date, and consequently in pronunciation. We pass on from Manning to Chaucer, from Chaucer to Lydgate ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... they're easier," Olive returned with a sigh, "but who could bear to do them when there are living, breathing, moving things; things that puzzle you by looking different every minute? No, I'll keep on trying, and when you get a little older we'll run away together and live and learn things by ourselves, in some place where ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... from head to foot, thoroughly. She wouldn't stick at murder—if she thought it safe. She'd do anything, say anything. Every word she uttered this morning had been rehearsed in her mind—with gestures, even. When I beat her, I beat this puzzle; that's sure." ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... Fretchville's house; I to stay at Mrs. Sinclair's; the stake I have in my country; my reversions; my economy; my person; my address; [something like in all this!] are brought in my favour, to induce her now not to leave me. How do I love to puzzle these ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... idea is it that you've got into that Chinese puzzle you call your head, Kong?" he replied; for this same William was one who habitually gilded unpalatable truths into the semblance of a flattering jest. "Whenever you turn off what you are saying into a willow-pattern compliment and bow seventeen times like an animated mandarin, I know that you are ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... nice puzzle for him, doesn't it?" the Operative said, and grinned. "After all, I didn't touch him—couldn't, in any way. He'd shielded himself perfectly from any telekinetic force—and I had no weapons. I couldn't even get to him barehanded because of his shield and the binder field. He had ...
— Sight Gag • Laurence Mark Janifer
... the sexual selection of sheep. As to the production of new species by the selection of variations, that is no news to your gardener. Now if you are familiar with these three processes: the survival of the fittest, sexual selection, and variation leading to new kinds, there is nothing to puzzle you in Darwinism. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... and listened, his jaws set hard together. Fast as the man talked the thoughts of Lance flew ahead, snatched at the significance of every detail, every bit of evidence. Some things puzzled Burt Brownlee, but Lance knew the answer to the puzzle while Burt talked and talked. Finally he laid his hand over the finely traced maps that showed secret trails, unguessed, hidden little draws where stolen stock had been concealed, all the fine threads that would weave the net close around ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... rather square jaw and chin, and smooth placid cheeks were strongly expressive of quiet decision and dignified force of will. The mouth, almost always the tell-tale feature of the face, seemed in his case rather calculated to puzzle any one who would have speculated on the meanings shadowed forth by the lines of it. It was certainly, with its large rows of unexceptionably brilliant teeth, a very handsome mouth. And it was often not devoid ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... make thee understand the first, the nature of it, and the cause why most men are born to it; as for the second, it would be treason for thee and me to do more than whisper it here, and sigh for it when none are listening; but the third need hardly puzzle thee; thy hookah [Footnote: Hookah: a kind of pipe for smoking tobacco, used in Eastern Europe and Asia.] is bright with it; all thy jewels are set in it; gold is inlaid in the ivory of thy bath; ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... flatter. Although in some respects you puzzle me, I am very clear and positive as to my feeling of gratitude. While my aunt feels kindly toward me, she is formal. It seemed to me when I came out of the cold of the wintry night I found within a more ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... negroes, standing about the driveway and outside the fence, people of the village grouped along the sidewalk, everybody out upon their doorsteps to watch the coach go by, and to all the face of the bride was a puzzle and a surprise. They half expected to see another coach coming with the other ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... perpetually reckon," namely, the loss of the action and of the equivalent stage directions. It is easy to imagine "what problems Shakespeare would present if he were printed like the Poetae Scenici Graeci," and not more difficult to realize how many things there would be to puzzle us in Ghosts and The Wild Duck if we possessed nothing but the ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... movements of men-of-war, sometimes of transports, sometimes of boats, sometimes of any two of these, sometimes of all three together; sometimes there were redcoats on board one, or two, or all three kinds of craft, and sometimes not. It was a dreadful puzzle for Montcalm, a puzzle made ten times worse because all the news of the British plans that could be found out ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... arrested by two words "Logs Wanted." He read the article through which told how the price of lumber had suddenly advanced, and that logs were in great demand. When Stephen laid down the paper and went into breakfast, the puzzle had been solved. What about that heavy timber at the rear of their farm? No axe had as yet rung there, no fire had devastated the place, and the trees stood tall and straight in majestic grandeur. A brook flowed near which would bear the logs down ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... they had saved. Especially sharp in Strether meanwhile was the conviction that his companion really knew, as we have hinted, where she had come out. It was at a very particular place—only THAT she would never tell him; it would be above all what he should have to puzzle for himself. This was what he hoped for, because his interest in the girl wouldn't be complete without it. No more would the appreciation to which she was entitled—so assured was he that the more ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... things Home suggested they should see, while, on the other hand, they saw things quite on their own account, when Home was busily engaged in conversation with some one else. The whole case must be made to hang together, and if "suggestion" be the key to the puzzle, it certainly ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... telling, I have known few on whom it had not a very sensible effect. I pick up the names of their acquaintance; amours and little squabbles are easily gleaned from among servants and neighbors; and, indeed, people themselves are the best intelligencers in the world for our purpose. They dare not puzzle us for their own sakes, for everyone is anxious to hear what he wishes to believe; and they who repeat it, to laugh at it when they have done, are generally more serious than their hearers are apt to imagine. With a tolerably good memory, and some ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Tepitotons, "little ones." The greatest proportion, however, are mere heads which never had had bodies, and will not stand anyhow. They could not have been personal ornaments, for there is nothing to fasten them on by. They are rather a puzzle. I have seen a suggestion somewhere, that when a man was buried, each surviving member of his family put one of these heads into his grave. This sounds plausible enough, especially as both male and female ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... undoubted marriage brings me to the question of sex. There is, of course, not the slightest doubt about it. Mrs. Ventris was a fairy wife. Mrs. Ventris was a puzzle to me for a good many years—in fact until Despoina explained to me many things. For Mrs. Ventris had a permanent human shape, and spoke as freely as you or I. I thought at one time that she might be the offspring of a mixed marriage, like Elsie Marks (whose mother, by the way, was ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... company arrived, and the girl asked me to hold a bank till supper was ready; but I declined, with a burst of laughter that seemed to puzzle her. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... and another. Some went on very well, some with heavy travail, and with results that made me grateful for our pictures and furniture. Yet it became fascinating work; it was like piecing out some vast picture-puzzle, one that might be of some use when finished. I improved, too. I was several days finishing the up-stairs, and by the time I got it done I had got back some of the dash I started off with. I could slap on the paste and swing the strip to the wall so handily that I was ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Jerome, who had a secret sense of superiority to his tenderer brother. And after about two hundred miles of it, it got to displease him as well as puzzle him. But he tried to check this sentiment as petty and unworthy. "Souls differ like locks," said he, "and preachers must differ like keys, or the fewer should the Church open for God to pass in. And certes, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... But puzzle as he might, he never once dreamed of the truth—that his sister Madelon had promised to marry Lot Gordon in a month's time, and sent her "yes" by word of mouth of Margaret Bean that morning. Somehow, ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... astonishment, almost in awe. Could this be the sensual, passionate voluptuary he had known two days since?—the strange, unprincipled, impulsive being, who yielded like the reed, to every gust of passion—this deep, clear, vigorous thinker! It was indeed a change to puzzle sager heads than that of Arvina! a transformation, sudden and beautiful as that from the torpid earthy grub, to the swift-winged etherial butterfly! He gazed at her, until she smiled in reply to his look of bewilderment; ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... something. God stoops o'er his head, Satan looks up between his feet—both tug— He's left, himself, i' the middle: the soul wakes And grows. Prolong that battle through his life! Never leave growing till the life to come! Here, we've got callous to the Virgin's winks That used to puzzle people wholesomely: 700 Men have outgrown the shame of being fools. What are the laws of nature, not to bend If the Church bid them?—brother Newman asks. Up with the Immaculate Conception, then— On to the rack with faith!—is ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... (We refer our readers to the notes of Dr Croly's edition for a running commentary of confutation to the "Essay on Man" distinguished by solid and unanswerable acuteness of argument.) But such an eloquent and ingenious puzzle as it is! It might have issued from the work-basket of Titania herself. It is another evidence of Pope's greatness in trifles. How he would have shone in fabricating the staves of the ark, or the fringes of ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... "'Don't puzzle me,' said I. 'But it is an indubitable verity,' I continued, addressing myself to the commissary, changing only the form of my asseveration,' that I owe the King of France nothing but my good-will, for he is a very honest man, and I wish him all the health ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... magistrate. He was sitting after his habit in his splint-bottomed chair tilted against the porch wall, waiting for the breakfast which his wife was getting within. As the crowd straggled up to the porch, he tilted his chair down, and came forward with a frown of puzzle. "What's this?" he demanded; then, catching sight of a woman's eager face among the foremost, his frown relaxed and he said, "Don't ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... what "striding" meant. What fun it was to feel what a word meant! Then when you used it, you could feel it lie down flat in the sentence, and fit into the other words, like a piece in a jig-saw puzzle when you got it into the right place. Gracious! How fast you could "stride" down those rocks ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... men, who, by their former voluntary wickedness, have justly deserved to be destroyed, and are thereby brought to destruction,] is a very just one, and in him not unfrequent. Nor does Josephus ever puzzle himself, or perplex his readers, with subtle hypotheses as to the manner of such judicial infatuations by God, while the justice of them is generally so obvious. That peculiar manner of the Divine operations, or permissions, or the means God ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... But he could not see why departed souls should be regarded as the shadows of living men. Rather it was we who lived in a vain show, and would continue to do so until the spirit, the true substance of us, should be set free. Well, whatever the truth of it might be, it was all a charming puzzle, and we should learn all about it some day, and meantime he had been furnished with an entirely new idea—the revealing power of darkness. He loved the light because it was beautiful, and now he loved the darkness because it was mysterious, and held such ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... are a puzzle; botanically it is a Primrose, but it is never so called. It has many names, but its most common are Paigle and Cowslip. Paigle has never been satisfactorily explained, nor has Cowslip. Our great etymologists, Cockayne and Dr. Prior and Wedgwood, are ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... "pieces" of poetry, and a few haphazard and detached observations (called "Nature Study" nowadays) about familiar things—"the cat," "the cow," "the parsnip," "the rainbow," and so forth—this was the jumble of stuff offered to the child's mind—a jumble to which it would puzzle a philosopher to give coherence. And what could a child get from it to kindle his enthusiasm for that civilized learning in which, none the less, it all may have its place? When the boy left school his "education" had ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... form. Of all the wonders of the intellectual world he felt that the greatest is the faith of Catholics, and he knew by the lesson of his early life that it is but slightly appreciated by the non-Catholic mind. That Catholics permit this ignorance to continue was a puzzle to him. And it was all the more annoying because any single one of them can multiply his influence indefinitely by his union with the most perfect organism ever known—the Catholic Church. The quiescence of a body of men, sincere and intelligent, infallibly certain of the means ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... very pretty name, and one of those which is [sic] supposed by novelists and young ladies to be aristocratic; why so is a puzzle; as its plain meaning is a tenant farmer and nothing more or less" (Two Years ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... Mecklenburg; when they have been settled in a good living for a few years, they begin to fill out like ordinary mortals. Braesig remembered this, and did not despair of seeing Godfrey a portly parson one of these days, though how it was to come about was rather a puzzle to him. Such was Godfrey Baldrian in appearance; but his portrait would not be complete if I did not add that he had the faintest possible tinge of Phariseeism in his expression. It was only a tinge, but with Phariseeism as with rennet, a very ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... inarticulate sound seemed to say that the course might vary in different cases. 'Generally,' said Hazel, 'I wait and puzzle it out ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... presented itself to his fancy in the guise of a puzzle-picture, which, though you study it never so diligently, remains incomprehensible, until by chance you view it from an unexpected angle, when it reveals itself intelligibly. It had not yet been his good fortune to ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... rush of angry feeling. He despised himself. How could he have got into such a mess? But at the same time, for his thoughts chased one another through his brain and yet seemed to stand together, in a hopeless confusion, like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle seen in a nightmare, he asked himself what he was going to do. Everything was so clear before him, all he had aimed at so long within reach at last, and now his inconceivable stupidity had erected this new obstacle. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... hath a body that is now in glory, ascended from his disciples, according to the scripture (Acts 1:3 compared with verses 9-11). But thou dost only fling up a few words into the air, that thou mightest thereby puzzle thy simple reader. But I bless God, for my part I do see thee, that thou dost, like a beguiled man, seek by all means to beguile others. And whereas thou sayest, It is sufficient to salvation, to know Christ Jesus as head ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... problem did not seem to puzzle her, the problem of this feeling so ill-founded. It was so. Very ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... order can admit you to the House? And as for a 'New Way to Pay Old Debts,' commend me to Commissioner Goulburn in Bankruptcy; while 'Love's Last Shift' is daily performed at the Court of Probate, under the distinguished patronage of Judge Wills. Is there any need to puzzle one's head over the decline of the drama, then? You might as well ask if a moderate smoker will pay exorbitantly for dried cabbage-leaves, when he can have prime Cubans for ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... boy thoughtfully, for his uncle's fulminations fell blankly upon his ears as he stood trying to puzzle out some of the pencilled words upon the ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... puzzle the wisest man. David himself, was put to a stand, by beholding the quiet death of ungodly men. Verily, sayes he, I have cleansed my heart in vain, and have washed my hands in innocency. Psal. 73. 13. They, to appearance fare better by far than I: Their eyes stand out with fatness, they ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... always studying women. Years before, Grace Ferrall had snapped her slim fingers in his face; and here, at Shotover, the field was limited. Mrs. Vendenning had left; Agatha Caithness was still a pale and reticent puzzle; Rena, Katharyn, and Eileen tormented him; Marion Page, coolly au fait, yawned in his face. There remained Sylvia, who, knowing nothing about his species, met him half-way with the sweet and sensitive deference ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... could only lay claim to an honest, pleasant, fresh-coloured intelligent face, only prevented by an air of high-breeding from being milkmaid-like. It was one of those parties when the ingenuity of piercing a puzzle is required to hinder more brothers and sisters from sitting together than could ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... watched the old woman's antics. She kept on laughing for some time, and then she reached out for her stockings. She found the only one she had left, and put it on. Then she reached around for the other, but failed to find it, because I had it in my pocket. This seemed to puzzle her. She stood up and looked all around for her missing stocking, but it wasn't there. Then she sat down again, pulled off the stocking she had on, and put it on the ...
— Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country • Joel Chandler Harris
... looks, his frank bearing, and his facile supremacy on the cricket-ground and in the racquet-court, was a popular hero; and of all his schoolfellows none paid him a more whole-hearted worship than the totally dissimilar Philip Vaughan. Their close and intimate affection was a standing puzzle to hard and dull and superficial natures; but a poet ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... in his expression that again moved Mrs. Bonnycastle to mirth. "How we do puzzle you Europeans! ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... calyx or bud of the lotus) inclose each a seated image, seventy-two more Buddhas sitting in those inner, upper circles, of Nirvana, facing a great dagaba, or final cupola, the exact function or purpose of which as key to the whole structure is still the puzzle of archaeologists. This final shrine is fifty feet in diameter, and either covered a relic of Buddha, or a central well where the ashes of priests and princes were deposited, or is a form surviving from the tree-temples of the earliest primitive East when nature-worship ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... with the obvious difficulty that if it is the nature of all phenomenal things to return to God, from whom they proceeded, the process which he calls the birth of the Son ought logically to occur in every conscious individual, for all have a like phenomenal existence. He attempts to solve this puzzle by the hypothesis of a double aspect of the new birth (see below). But I fear there is some justice in Professor Pearson's comment, "Thus his phenomenology is ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... character; while poor Abbott, to whom I now throw a few small coins in charity, was a setter of type. The rest of the party is made up of Pete Cunningham, Sam Glenn, Bill Dimond, Jim Brand, Bill Donaldson, Dan Townsend, Jack Weaver, Cal Smith, and a host of others whom it would puzzle the very ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... preparation of the work no pains have been spared to insure clearness in general directions, and every point which would be likely to puzzle the reader has been specially covered by separate illustration. In this particular it stands unique in the list of boys' books. Every difficulty has been anticipated, and in every instance the illustrations will be found thoroughly comprehensive ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... then returned to the Pilgrim Inn, dashed and fallen in spirit. He had thought that their troubles were at an end, but here was a new difficulty at which in truth he rather feared to guess. The Chevalier's departure to Spain had been a puzzle to him before; he remembered now that the Chevalier had agreed with reluctance to his enterprise, and had never been more than lukewarm in its support. That reluctance, that lukewarmness, he had attributed ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... railway-laborers, has been transmogrified into navigator. We believe that more people could tell why the month of July was so called than could explain the origin of the names for our days of the week, and that it is oftener the Saxon than the French words in Chaucer that puzzle the modern reader.] ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... of every human being is a puzzle to every other. With what is it occupied when left to its own devices? There is, in Barwood's handwriting,[1] proof that his brain was filled with a procession of changing activities and impressions which were for the most part melancholy,—aspirations for fame, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... bewilderingly girlish appearance. As he looked in upon her she raised her face so that the light shone full upon it; her brows were puckered, she nibbled at the end of her pencil, in the midst of some creative puzzle. ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... "Not these puzzle the will; Not these the yet unanswered question urge. But the unjust stricken; but the hands that kill Lopped; but the ...
— A Father of Women - and other poems • Alice Meynell
... new order of philosophers is appearing; I shall venture to baptize them by a name not without danger. As far as I understand them, as far as they allow themselves to be understood—for it is their nature to WISH to remain something of a puzzle—these philosophers of the future might rightly, perhaps also wrongly, claim to be designated as "tempters." This name itself is after all only an attempt, or, if it be ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... come along like a buck before a forest fire. But it is strange to me how you find your way so clearly out here with never track nor trail to guide you. It would puzzle me, Ephraim, to find America, to say nought of the Narrows ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... difficult attempt, as the image of her mother was the one which insisted on taking the pre-eminence in her mind. She ordered it down, with a sort of bitterness. Had her mother been alive, she would have gladly fled from this puzzle into which her life had tangled itself, and gone back to America to rest and mother-love. So she told herself, at least. But then followed the reflection that in her mother's death the refuge of love's ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... "Pilgrimage." Between this point and Ras Za'farnah, higher up, the wind seems to split: a strong southerly gale will be blowing, whilst a norther of equal pressure prevails at the Gulf-head, and vice vers. Suez, indeed, appears to be, in more ways than one, a hydrographical puzzle. When it is low water in and near the harbour, the flow is high between the Straits of Jobal and the Daedalus Light; and the ebb tide runs out about two points across the narrows, whilst the flood runs in on a line parallel with it. Finally, when we returned, ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... may be of great service to many literary men, and indeed to the cause of literature in general; and this, too, without much trouble to yourself? Would you be willing to receive "Queries" respecting references? They frequently puzzle those who are engaged in literary works, and indeed those who are merely readers, and who have not access to public libraries or the manuscript treasures of the metropolis and the universities. If, for instance, a clergyman or squire, interested in the history ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 2, November 10 1849 • Various
... large dining-hall, where they may enjoy themselves in moderation, as befits sages, not without puns and repartees, epigrams, anagrams, and Attic salt, to be fatal, alas, to poor Diodorus the dialectician. For Stilpo, prince of sophists, having silenced him by some quibbling puzzle of logic, Ptolemy surnamed him Chronos the Slow. Poor Diodorus went home, took pen and ink, wrote a treatise on the awful nothing, and died in despair, leaving five "dialectical daughters" behind him, to be thorns in the sides of some five hapless men of Macedonia, as "emancipated ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... to know I'm not showing it about, or brooding over it like a bit of a jigsaw puzzle," I thought. But the eye I wished to catch remained glued to the porpoises, and only they could tell whether it darkened with dread or twinkled with suppressed laughter. Even Mrs. Shuster hadn't the "cheek" to try and attract ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... My former sad experience, as you know, has gifted me with some degree of insight into the gloomy mysteries of the human heart, through which I have wandered like one astray in a dark cavern, with his torch fast flickering to extinction. But this man, this class of men, is a hopeless puzzle." ...
— The Christmas Banquet (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... puzzle La Place to calculate the probability of any particular name being authentic amid this wilderness ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... the region of romance; history knows nothing of it. Even the name of Scilly is a puzzle, though perhaps the best authorities think that it derives from the widespread tribe of the Silures. Strictly speaking, the name Scilly only attaches to one small islet lying off Bryher, but somehow it ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... very still; which as it did chance, was maybe not such an utter foolishness; for my head did seem in that half-gloom to be, mayhap, no more than a little rock in the water, and I made no move to tell of life; yet should the Hound have smelled me; and that it failed in this matter, doth be a puzzle ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... Phil, struggling into a white, medallioned blouse that fastened as intricately as the working of a prize puzzle. "I've taken such a dislike to her, and she ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... playing assumed a deeper interest; here was something which she could not yet fathom. She saw what influence had driven him to her, against his inclination, but his motive for seeming to obey, while dreading success, was a puzzle. Singularly enough, a slight feeling of commiseration began to soften her previous contempt, and hastened her ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... not like a problem in arithmetic, to be solved by learning the rule; it is more like a puzzle of blocks, or wire rings—you just keep trying one way after another, until finally ...
— 21 • Frank Crane
... careless, irresponsible crowd. I'm irresponsible, too, and they understand me. They trust you, but you sometimes puzzle them. Perhaps ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... long intervals the huge hacienda of the landed lord, walled in like a fortress; but where are the ranchos, the homes of the common people? True, I have noticed the ruins of many, and that explains the puzzle. I remember, now that I am on the frontier: that for years past the banks of the Rio Bravo, from its source to the sea, have been hostile ground—a war-border of fifteen hundred miles in length! Many a red conflict has occurred—is still occurring—between those Arabs of ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... exertion, he considered such "a howwid boah," that he always most carefully avoided those occasions for distinguishing himself, which other men are wont to seek with avidity. Why on earth he ever entered the navy was a puzzle which ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... governing Influence in the Minds and upon the Actions of Men, is a Question I am not yet come to, nor indeed does it so particularly belong to the Devil's History, it seems rather a Polemick, so it may pass at School among the Metaphysicks, and puzzle the Heads of our Masters; wherefore I think to write to the learned Dr. B—— about it, imploring his most sublime Haughtiness, that when his other more momentous Avocations of Pedantry and Pedagogism will give him an Interval from Wrath and Contention, ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... smoked glasses if you'll wear them. And I don't want to go alone. David went back on me; he's got a new book. It's a puzzle to me why any man should want to read when he can ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... far as they ever got in the solution of the eternal puzzle of how one man holds a hundred under his thumb and sleeps the sleep ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... which I had been wounded three times and had campaigned from Wagram to Portugal. I could not understand why I was being treated like this, after what the Emperor and the Comte de Lobau had said to me. It was the latter who gave me the key to this puzzle. ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... wrong?—Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... quite apart from its technicalities, puzzled Christina; and to puzzle Christina was to annoy her. To her mind it seemed to have been written for the sake of covering so much paper. Of course she wanted Macgregor to be interested in his work, but not to the exclusion of herself. She allowed the ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... blank, were torn out. Several pages are covered with mere vacant scrawling by my boyish hand; whether I threw it away in utter contempt, or concealed it back of the old chimney, in curious conjecture whether some unborn generations, would not at some distant day discover it, and puzzle over it, I cannot tell. I have no recollection of it whatever; except that I had a general impression that we used to have more of grandfather's writings than we possessed in later years. Whether we had still others I know ...
— Log-book of Timothy Boardman • Samuel W Boardman
... them in curious animal forms, and other similar things. It was known, positively, that these objects had been found in Egypt, but it was impossible to assign them a place in the known periods of Egyptian art. The puzzle was increased in difficulty by certain plates of slate with hunting and battle scenes and other representations in relief in a style so strange that many investigators considered them products of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... the Archbishop's throne, which has been replaced by a heavy modern structure, the whole eighty-eight, of which two have disappeared, cost 6961 livres to make, and the greater part of the figures were done by Pol Mosselmen (whose Flemish name was a terrible puzzle to mediaeval scribes) and Francois Trubert. Two other Flemish carvers, Laurens Hisbre and Gillet Duchastel, occur in the complete list of eleven sculptors who were paid by the piece as recorded in the Chapterhouse accounts. The designs were made by Philippot Viart, "maistre huchier" de Rouen, ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... out to the summit of the ridge in the big pasture, climbing lightly, with the springy ease born of the vigor her nineteen outdoor years had stored in the strong young body. She wanted to be alone, to puzzle out what the coming of this man meant to her. Had he intended anything by that last drawling remark of his in the store? Why was it that his careless, half insulting familiarity set the blood leaping through ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... problem must remain obscure, a welcome puzzle to antiquaries, philologists, and ethnologists. Our knowledge of Pictish religion is too scanty for the interpretation of Celtic religion to be affected by it. But we know that the Picts offered sacrifice before war—a Celtic custom, ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... function. We know what would occur. A considerable proportion of the community, more especially the more youthful members, possessed by an instinctive and legitimate curiosity, would concentrate their thoughts on the subject. They would have so many problems to puzzle over: How often ought I to eat? What ought I to eat? Is it wrong to eat fruit, which I like? Ought I to eat grass, which I don't like? Instinct notwithstanding, we may be quite sure that only a small minority would succeed in eating reasonably ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... greatly at this, and I could think of no answer to the puzzle, save that Naomi must have won the servant's heart, as she won all hearts. Or, perhaps, he knew what it was to love, and ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... chair I tried to puzzle out the probable meaning of this somewhat extraordinary happening. My acquiescence in the attitude that had been so suddenly forced upon me was owing entirely to one circumstance. Mr. Joseph H. Parker I had recognized at his first entrance as a regular habitue of the restaurant. He was usually ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... puzzle to me—all except the double pay I get," responded Joe. "For nearly a week I've had a funny order. One dark night some one pushed up a window here and threw in a card. It contained instructions and a ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman
... figures as th' iddycated pig they showed in th' tint las' week in Haley's vacant lot, and in joggerphy, asthronomy, algybbera, jommethry, chimisthry, physiojnomy, bassoophly an' fractions, I was often har-rd put mesilf to puzzle him. I heerd him gradyooate an' his composition was so fine very few cud make ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... who collects stamps will readily separate the great colonising powers, and group and locate their separate colonies. How many other boys, even after they have passed through the last stage of their school life, could do this? Little-known countries and states are too often a puzzle to the ordinary schoolboy, which are familiar places to the stamp collecting youth. Ask the ordinary schoolboy in which continents are such places as Angola, Annam, Curacao, Funchal, Holkar, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Nepaul, Reunion, St. Lucia, ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... allusions and illustrations which puzzle the non-classical reader. I add an explanatory index to some names of things and persons which have not occurred in my brief outline ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... only one thing to be done in a hurry (or sprauto); and even if he had not informed us what that one thing is, very few indeed would ever have imagined that it was fish-catching. The word sprote was a puzzle to me, and I had often questioned myself as to its meaning, but never could get a satisfactory answer; nor was it until some time after the publication of the 2nd edition of my Analecta that it occurred to me that it might ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... only to respond to the inquiries we are constantly receiving, and to supply useful hints to those who are unable to avail themselves of lessons, and are forced to puzzle over their difficulties without help from a trained and experienced embroiderer; at the same time, the rules we have laid down and the directions we have given may serve to remind those who have passed through the classes, of many little details which might easily be forgotten ...
— Handbook of Embroidery • L. Higgin
... puzzle some people to know how you got your commission, Harry. You're no fossil, of course, but you're no angel, either, and there are some things in your career that aren't exactly laid ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... interesting volume is number six, containing, among other material, the famous "Man in the Iron Mask." This unsolved puzzle of history was later incorporated by Dumas in one of the D'Artagnan Romances a section of the Vicomte de Bragelonne, to which it gave its name. But in this later form, the true story of this singular man doomed to wear an iron vizor over his features during his entire lifetime could ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... that two and two make four explains why I give the same name to certain numbers; but the giving the name does not explain the belief. Meanwhile, if a class name be simply the mark which is put upon a bundle of things, we have got rid of a puzzle. Mill triumphs over the unfortunate realists who held that a class meant a mysterious entity, existing somewhere apart from all the individuals in which it is embodied. There is really nothing mysterious; a name is first the mark of an individual, the individual corresponding to a 'cluster' or a ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... with grave curiosity. Such antics he had surely never seen. Pale and silent, as he sat on Jim's big knee one evening, he watched the men intently, their crude attempts at his entertainment furnishing an obvious puzzle to his tiny mind. Then presently he looked with wonder and awe at the presents, unable to understand that all this wealth of bottles, cubes, tops, balls, ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... hour I patiently tracked my quarry, through a network of narrow streets and alleys crossing and re-crossing each other like an Eastern puzzle. By this time I was hopelessly astray, never having been in that quarter, which was one of the worst in the city. Under other circumstances I should have feared to trust myself in those horrible courts, but now I did not even remember ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... rule Moslems are absurdly ignorant of arithmetic and apparently cannot master it. Hence in Egypt they used Copts for calculating-machines and further East Hindds. The mildest numerical puzzle, like the above, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Everyone knows that there is no such effectual means of developing the power to swallow camels as incessant watchfulness for opportunities of straining at gnats, and this should explain many passages that puzzle us in the work both of our clerics and our scientists. I, not being a man of science, still continue to do what I said I did in Alps and Sanctuaries, and make it a rule to earnestly and patiently ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler |
