"Mystify" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not trying to mystify you," he assured me. "But the truth is so hard to believe sometimes that in the present case I hesitate to divulge it. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... Plunder, rifle, loot, sack, pillage, devastate, despoil. Pretty, beautiful, comely, handsome, fair. Profitable, remunerative, lucrative, gainful. Prompt, punctual, ready, expeditious. Pull, draw, drag, haul, tug, tow. Push, shove, thrust. Puzzle, perplex, mystify, bewilder. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the use of wrapping things up in mystery? But women delight in it! The more they can mystify and mislead and perplex you, and leave their real or their possible meaning doubtful and involved, the greater the pleasure they have. They will carry on a conversation for hours by hints, suggestions, ambiguous terms, allusions, phrases that may mean anything or nothing, and then leave ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... presented by Beersheba. It was also necessary to keep the enemy in doubt as to where the decisive blow was to fall; so another operation, on as large a scale as the available force would permit, and calculated both to mystify the enemy and to draw off a portion of his reserves, was undertaken on the immediate sea front at Gaza. Thus we get, firstly, the capture of Beersheba; secondly, the attack on the Gaza coastal defences; and, thirdly, the main ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... minority of the committee sent in a very strong report condemning the system. He declares "the system is nothing but an absurd attempt to mystify and perplex a subject, which ought to be left plain and clear to the common apprehensions of common men." Further on he states, "No human ingenuity can show a reason for believing that the way to learn the true alphabet, is first to study a false ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... reckoning which, in face of such a catena as this, stretching its links over the whole period, maintains that England wanted Germans to teach her how to admire the writer whom Germans have done more to mystify and distort than even his ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... unlike most German officers and did not understand French, or thought it a good joke to mystify a poor devil of a soldier. He smiled and raised his hand, indicating by his motion that the other was to keep following the road he ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... get fodder, in such impassable weather, for such a herd of horses; but he said that they lived upon straw and sawdust; and he knew that I did not believe him, any more than about his star-shavings. And this was just the thing he loved—to mystify honest people, and be a great deal too knowing. However, I may judge him harshly, because ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... gab' is in this case, as in many others, a very great resource. A striking remark or bon mot will easily mystify the spectators, and attract their attention from what you are DOING. Hence all prestidigitators are always well stocked with anecdotes and funny observations; indeed, they talk incessantly: they speak well, too, and they take care to time the word accurately with the moment when their fingers ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... apologize to you. I mean on behalf of the company. I think it was wrong to offer you money. I think it was more wrong to mystify you with medical language and call the thing delirium. I have more respect for conjurer's patter than for doctor's patter. They are both meant to stupify; but yours only to stupify for a moment. Now I put it to you in plain words and on plain human Christian ...
— Magic - A Fantastic Comedy • G.K. Chesterton
... breath, but had enough sense to lie down again in the straw, and feign slumber; happily the priest did not concern himself with the loft, but the absence of the bird he had expected to find, caged and waiting, seemed to mystify him. He remained for several minutes lost in thought, then setting the lantern on one box, moved others around, strewed them with a thick layer of hay he found on the floor, and lying down with his cloak pulled well ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... the thought and expression should be clear; the poet should not mystify the reader nor tax too far his efforts at comprehension. Browning sometimes grievously offends in this particular. While insisting on clearness, however, we should not forget that the mystical and the musical have their place in poetry. A poem may ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... mysteries to each other," she suggested. "I mystify you because I wonder, and you mystify me because you don't guess why I wonder. We'll let it go at that, ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... to mystify the world to a greater degree. The only thing that came to light was the cause of the bodies' bonelike rigidity. In some inexplicable way the bones in the seamen had dissolved, and according to appearances, while the bodies were plastic, had flattened out. And then, strange and unnatural though ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... thinking he meant to return direct to Spain, in spite of the fact that the ships were too rotten for the long trip. But no; the Admiral hoped, besides escaping currents, to mystify them as to the geographical position of the gold coast. Remembering how Alonzo de Ojeda had gone back and reaped riches from the pearl coast, and how Pedro Nino, that captain who brought slaves to Cadiz and sent word that he had brought a cargo of ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... or agreed upon the appointment of somebody else to act as his substitute. This was, in nine cases out of ten, the eminently unromantic cavalier servitude of fact. The high-flown, complimentary language, the profound bowing and hand-kissing of the period, combined to mystify strangers as to its real significance. Sometimes, when there was really a lover in the question, the cavalier servente must have been a serious impediment; he was always La plante ... a contrecarrer un pauvre tiers, in ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... those days occur to me that I had a rival in Mr. Talbot. Helen and I used to laugh at his crass ignorance, and mystify him now and then by our allusions. Miss Lenox was never vivacious at table, and used to listen languidly to all of us, turning to me now and then and regarding me with a sort of pleased curiosity when she thought ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... you are joking,” he replied, with a slight show of temper, “or trying to mystify me, for only this morning I was on the beach watching the bathing, and I saw a number of ladies in quite short skirts—up to their knees, in fact—with the thinnest covering on their shapely extremities. Were those ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... tricks, Prime," cried Tom, suspecting the negro of an intention to mystify them with a jargon like that he had ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... assured him was the manner of life—with what the necessities of the case led him to believe would be the condition of spirit—of the other? If the tale were to be published, the fun would lie, not in attempting to mystify the reader, but in watching with him the mystification of the hero,—in showing how he played at hoodman-blind with his destiny, and how surprised he was, when, the bandage stripped from his eyes, he saw ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... making Mr. angry, but he did get angry. He left off speaking to me by my Christian name; he called me by my surname. He said: "Let me tell you, Miss Gracedieu, it is not becoming in a young lady to mystify ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... 'cute of "Piccadilly," HARRIS the Prophet, the BLAVATSKY craze, Thibet, Theosophy, and Bounding Brothers— No, Mystic Ones—Mahatmas I should say, But really they seem so much like the others In slippery agility!—day by day Mystify me yet more. Those germs were bad enough, But what are they compared with Astral Bodies? Of Useless Knowledge I have almost had enough, I really envy uninquiring noddies, I would not be a Chela if I could. I have a horror ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 26, 1891 • Various
... antelope. My chief excuse for doing it is to enable people at home to know the difference between a topi and a sun hat and between a sing-sing and a cob. The names of many of the African antelope family are strange and confusing, so that it is little wonder that they mystify people in America. There are a hundred or more kinds, and no one can hope to know them unless he makes a ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... agreed to provide them with such supplies as they needed. For such as they took with them the girls paid then and there. Harriet chuckled all the way back to the island. She believed that she had planned in such a way as thoroughly to mystify George Baker and his friends, and at the same time convince the latter that the Meadow-Brook Girls ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Afloat • Janet Aldridge
... be it understood, not for any fault of hers. People did not always understand her; her mother had understood her perfectly, and consequently had never interfered with her ways. Mina loved a mystification too, and especially to mystify uncle Duplay, who thought himself so clever—was clever indeed as men went, she acknowledged generously; but men did not go far. It would be fun to choose Merrion Lodge for her summer home, first because ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... the man as he is at all", said O'Hara: "perhaps you cannot. High finance, the first day he looked into it, ceased to mystify him, for he goes always to the ground of things, touches bottom, where first principles lie, and first principles are simple as two and two. It was because he had discovered a first principle that he escaped ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... play of color again in her cheeks. "Allow me to forbid it unconditionally. I must be plain with you, Mr. Cashel Byron. I do not know what you are or who you are; and I believe you have tried to mystify me ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... histories together form but one—that of NUTRITION, or the act of nourishing; in other words, of supporting life. This is what I called eating at first, that I might not mystify you at the beginning with hard words. But now that we are growing learned ourselves, we must accustom ourselves to the terms in use among learned people, especially when they are not more formidable than those I have just ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace |
