"Riddle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... come, come, little Tiny, Let's hear what you have to tell Learned of the years you've scampered Over the hill and dell— What! Only a bark for answer? Now, Tiny, that isn't the thing Will help unravel the riddle Of wonderful, wonderful Spring. ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... are not what they seem, and that the outward shows Of grade and rank are only masks that hide our joys and woes; That with the soul, the soul alone, resides the awful power, To light with sunshine or o'ergloom the solitary hour; And that the human heart is but a riddle to be read, When all the darkness round it now in other ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... to be facetious," returned O'Sullivan sourly. "But I would ask you to remember that you are not yet out of the woods, Mr. Montagu. My Lord seems satisfied, but here are some more of us waiting a plain answer to this riddle." ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... Buddha is compared with the rhinoceros khadga that lives lonely in the wilderness. He is also called Nidana Buddha, as having mastered the twelve nidanas (the twelve links in the everlasting chain of cause and effect in the whole range of existence, the understanding of which solves the riddle of life, revealing the inanity of all forms of existence, and preparing the mind for nirvana). He is also compared to a horse, which, crossing a river, almost buries its body under the water, without, however, touching the bottom of the river. Thus in crossing ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... all," Nigel replied. "He must have come to the conclusion that the key to the riddle he was trying to solve was in China, and gone on there. Look here, Maggie," he continued, after a moment's hesitation, "do you think anything could be done ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... cargoes, she came quietly to sit at our table and looking at me very hard with her black, sparkling eyes asked Dominic familiarly what had happened to his Signorino. It was her name for me. I was Dominic's Signorino. She knew me by no other; and our connection has always been somewhat of a riddle to her. She said that I was somehow changed since she saw me last. In her rich voice she urged Dominic only to look at my eyes. I must have had some piece of luck come to me either in love or at cards, she bantered. But Dominic answered half ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... her girlhood dream of love, she could not see. And Kenny was passionately glad that his words were a riddle. ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... Renan, De l'Origine du Langage, pp. 146-149; and an admirable article on 'Slang' in the Times, Oct. 18, 1864.] And thus, when a word entirely refuses to tell us anything about itself, it must be regarded as a riddle which no one has succeeded in solving, a lock of which no man has found the key—but still a riddle which has a solution, a lock for which there is a key, though now, it may be, irrecoverably lost. And this difficulty— it is oftentimes an impossibility—of tracing ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... the royal riddle of England's governance. We are swayed by the brain of a man behind the mask of woman's face. To the woman that we behold we pay that chivalrous deference and loving devotion that her sex and her station ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... I still can harp, and carp, and fiddle. What further hath befallen or may befall The hero of this grand poetic riddle, I by and by may tell you, if at all: But now I choose to break off in the middle, Worn out with battering Ismail's stubborn wall, While Juan is sent off with the despatch, For which all Petersburgh ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... problem that lays so heavy on the Southern and Northern heart and conscience and the riddle gits harder and harder to solve. The lurid blaze of livin' torches makes bloody blindness in the eyes of them that look on and light them fires. The disgraceful glare flames out, shamin' you in the eyes of the world, and streams up to the pityin' ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... hast sounded to the deeps that circumfluent ocean called "practical human life," and hast taught the acutest of its navigators to consider how far its courses are guided by orbs in heaven,—canst thou solve this riddle which, if it perplexes me, must perplex so many? What is the real distinction between the rare genius and the commonalty of human souls that feel to the quick all the grandest and divinest things which the rare ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ...! I almost said somethin' I oughtn't to!—[He steps back among the people.] I'll give you a riddle to guess. Shall I? Still waters run deep! 'Tis bad. You mustn't taste blood—no, no! The thirst only gets ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Silver said was a riddle to him, but you would never have guessed it from his tone. As for me, I began to have an inkling. Ben Gunn's last words came back to my mind. I began to suppose that he had paid the buccaneers a visit while they all lay drunk together round their fire, ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with a wooden sound, And fill the hearing with childish glee Of rhyming riddle, or story found In the Robinson Crusoe, leather-bound Old book of ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... it is supposed, increase the dose of respect (though some people, in some cases, find it hard) when considering a further quality or property—the Riddle-attraction of Rabelais. This riddle-attraction—or attractions, for it might be better spoken of in a very large plural—is of course quite undeniable in itself. There are as many second intentions in the ordinary sense, apparently ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... repeated Bazarov. 'Perhaps you are right; perhaps, really, every one is a riddle. You, for instance; you avoid society, you are oppressed by it, and you have invited two students to stay with you. What makes you, with your intellect, with your beauty, live in ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... messenger that took the word across the boundary. He could not fathom the mystery, he could not picture to himself the missing link in the chain. As was always the case with him, his mind began at once to grapple with its problem—in this instance the riddle of the missing link. He actually forgot ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... letters. Among other extremely curious terra-cottas I must also mention three pots with three rows of perforations; they have the usual handle on one side and three feet on the other; also three large vases with perforations right round, on all sides, from the bottom to the top; their use is a riddle to me; can they have served as bee-hives? Also a vessel in the form of a pig, with four feet, which are, however, shorter than the belly, so that the vessel can not stand upon them; the neck of the vessel, which is attached to the back of the pig, is connected with the hinder part by a handle. ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... was one of the birds that had escaped me in my first visit to Colorado, save as I had caught tantalizing glimpses of him from the car-window on the plain beyond Denver, and when I went south to Colorado Springs, I utterly failed to find him. It has been a sort of riddle to me that not one could be discovered in that vicinity, while two years later these birds were abundant on the plains both east and west of Denver. If Colorado Springs is a little too far south for them in the summer, Denver is obviously just to their liking. No less abundant were the western ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... in the following battles: Fort Sumter, First Manassas, Yorktown, New Stone Point, West Point, Seven Pines, Mechanicsville, Chancellorsville, Riddle's Shop, Darby's Farm, Fossil's Mill, Petersburg, Jerusalem, Plank Road, Reams' Station, Winchester, Port Republic, and Cedar Run. Severely wounded in leg at Mechanicsville and again at Cedar Run, October 12th, 1864. ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... I've solved the riddle," cried Scraps, dancing with glee. "Those fence-boards are made of wood, and if the Woozy stands close to the fence and lets his eyes flash fire, they might set fire to the fence and burn it up. Then he could walk away with us ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... And the riddle did not long remain unanswered. Upon that seat, as I swept up alongside and laid a sunburnt hand upon its edge, was a girl, and another look told me she ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... influence have thus been exhibited in the case of Hercules and of Castor, and it remains to inquire what Etruria did. There is no race about which we know so much and yet so little as about the Etruscans. They have always been and still are a riddle, and as our knowledge of them increases we seem further than ever from a solution, and what we gain in positive knowledge is more than counterbalanced by the increased sense of our ignorance. Altogether ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... her riddle I read) Was a woman of genius: whose genius, indeed, With her life was at war. Once, but once, in that life The chance had been hers to escape from this strife In herself; finding peace in the life of another From the passionate wants she, in hers, ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... trying to make him understand my real motives (one's own relations are never sympathetic), and I was somewhat nonplussed for an answer, until the reflection occurred to me: What was he doing there? This riddle I, in my turn, propounded to him, with the result that we entered into treaty, by the terms of which it was agreed that no future reference should be made to the meeting by either of us—especially ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... down. Cabot stared at him, crossed his knees, and continued to stare. Occasionally he shook his head, as if the riddle were proving too much for him. Galusha did not move. Neither man spoke. The old ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... then, is it on account of his parents' sinning? Why, then, do the guilty go comparatively free, and the guiltless suffer? Sin, surely, is the only cause of the infliction. So the disciples of old, brought face to face with exactly this same riddle, the same mystery, ask, "Master, who did sin—this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?" "Neither." Another—higher, happier, more glorious reason, Jesus gives: "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... same, not to say a growing, number of beardless, ambitious boys, who advance, head erect, and the heart that Princess Tourandocte of the Mille et un Jours—each one of them fain to be her Prince Calaf. But never a one of them reads the riddle. One by one they drop, some into the trench where failures lie, some into the mire of journalism, some again into the quagmires ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... give more details, something more tangible to go by. But what is there to give?... I have nothing.... The whole thing is a riddle to me. (Turning to Julian) In the afternoon she went out for a short walk as usual.... (To Felix) Was there anything about her that attracted attention?... It seems quite impossible to me that she could have had anything in mind when she left the house—that she could know ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... the extraordinary thrill of the moment, were recently revived for me by the reading of the essay "Ultimate Questions," in the last and not least precious volume bequeathed us by the world's greatest thinker. The essay contains his final utterance about the riddle of life and death, as that riddle presented itself to his vast mind in the dusk of a lifetime of intellectual toil. Certainly the substance of what he had to tell us might have been inferred from the Synthetic Philosophy; but the ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... sweetness? Perhaps therein lay the secret of his hallucinating visions. Perhaps a drug had perverted his brain. But within the week the dangerous perfume had become dissipated, and with it vanished all hope of solving the riddle. Oh, to sense once more the enchantments of its fragrance, once more revel in the sublimated intoxication of mighty forces weaving at the loom of life! By the cadences of what infernal art had he been vouchsafed a ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... persists the fool, "that the king can't make such another as you are, any more than all the king's horses and all the king's men can put Humty-dumty together again, which is an ancient riddle, and full of marrow. And soe he'll find, if ever he lifts thy head off from thy ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... graduation, organization; grouping; tabulation. analysis, classification, clustering, division, digestion. [Result of arrangement] digest; synopsis &c. (compendium) 596; syntagma[Gram], table, atlas; file, database; register. &c. (record) 551; organism, architecture. [Instrument for sorting] sieve, riddle, screen, sorter. V. reduce to order, bring into order; introduce order into; rally. arrange, dispose, place, form; put in order, set in order, place in order; set out, collocate, pack, marshal, range, size, rank, group, parcel out, allot, distribute, deal; cast the parts, assign the parts; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... dear Ibrahim, read me this riddle: if the devil gets into water and kills, why don't he kill when he ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... guess it all too soon; Failure brings no kind of stigma - Dance we to another tune! String the lyre and fill the cup, Lest on sorrow we should sup; Hop and skip to Fancy's fiddle, Hands across and down the middle - Life's perhaps the only riddle That we ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... not, good sir; the world to me A riddle is at best—my heart has had No tutor. From my childhood until now My thoughts have been ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... which once employed so many hands, should have so completely collapsed is, as I have hinted, a bit of a mystery. I can only guess, and as tracking conundrums is not my purpose in these chapters, I will leave others to unravel the riddle if they can. It is, however, a matter of local business history that some thirty years or more ago the Cambridge Street concern shewed signs of tottering to its fall, and when Mr. Atkins went into the business as a proprietor, he had to make some sweeping reforms that naturally created some resentment ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... or so and then woke up to the contemplation of Miriam's hunched back and the riddle of life, and this bright attractive idea of ending for ever and ever and ever all the things that were locking him in, this bright idea that shone like a baleful star above all the reek and darkness ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... enough. She kept back enough to establish herself and Mark in rooms, should she be successful in finding some unfurnished rooms sufficiently cheap to allow her to take them, although how she was going to live for more than two years on what she had was a riddle of which after a month of sleepless nights she ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... overcome. Rachel was nodding her head. She must make an answer to this. It was a riddle asking an answer. ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... origin, probably coined in burlesque imitation of scholastic Latin, as "hocus-pocus" or "panjandrum"), originally a term meaning whim, fancy or ridiculous idea; later applied to a pun or play upon words, and thus, in its usual sense, to a particular form of riddle in which the answer depends on a pun. In a transferred sense the word is also used of any ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... [H.]eres of Gideon. Still the probability is that a mount sacred to the sun is meant here as well as in the reference to the Danites; though [h.]eres as meaning the sun itself occurs in the story of Samson's riddle, for the men of the city gave him the answer to it which they had extorted from his wife, "before the sun ([h.]eres) went down." Shemesh, the Samas of the Babylonians, is the usual word for the sun; and we find it in Beth-shemesh, the "house of the sun," a Levitical city ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... perishable glory and the imperishable hope of man. He looked up into the vast countenance of the crouching Sphinx and vainly tried to read the meaning of the calm eyes and smiling mouth. Was it, indeed, the mockery of all effort and all aspiration, as Tigranes had said—the cruel jest of a riddle that has no answer, a search that never can succeed? Or was there a touch of pity and encouragement in that inscrutable smile—a promise that even the defeated should attain a victory, and the disappointed should discover a prize, and the ignorant should be made wise, and ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... his mysterious smile, proud at being an unsolvable riddle: "It is like speaking of birds who do not fly, to talk of thieves ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... asked Sir Wulfric haughtily. 'Thy speech is dark, and eke scarce courteous. Unravel me this riddle!' ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... Metaphors are very bold but just; I must however observe that the Metaphors are not [so] thick sown in Milton which always savours too much of Wit; that they never clash with one another, which, as Aristotle observes, turns a Sentence into a kind of an Enigma or Riddle; [6] and that he seldom has recourse to them where the proper and natural ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Davis, Dixon, Doolittle, Guthrie, Hendricks, Johnson, McDougall, Morgan, Nesmith, Norton, Riddle, Saulsbury, Stewart, Stockton, ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... doubtful whether good comes from the use of the Bible as a riddle-book, nor do the "Bible games" tend to develop a natural appreciation of the book. There is no new light but rather a confusing shadow thrown on the character of Joseph by the foolish conundrum concerning Pharaoh making a ruler out of him. Sending a child to the Bible to discover the ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... characteristically disregardful of the public applause which the success of his witty endeavours might have so easily elicited. That the school, indeed, did not feel his design, perceive its accomplishment, and participate in his sneer, was, for many anxious months, a riddle I could not resolve. Perhaps the gradation of his copy rendered it not so readily perceptible; or, more possibly, I owed my security to the master air of the copyist, who, disdaining the letter, (which ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... reconciliation of these two principles, since it regards the whole of nature as one, and sees only efficient causes at work in it. Dualism, on the contrary, holds that nature and spirit, matter and force, the world and God, inorganic and organic nature, are separate and independent existences. Cf. The Riddle of the Universe chapter 12.) At this point the science of human evolution has a direct and profound bearing on the foundations of philosophy. Modern anthropology has, by its astounding discoveries during the second half of the nineteenth century, compelled us to ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... a vision in my sleep last night, between sleeping and waking, a figure standing beside me, thin, miserable, sad, and sorrowful; the shadow of night upon his face, the tracks of the tears down his cheeks. His ribs were bending like the bottom of a riddle; his nose thin, that it would go through a cambric needle; his shoulders hard and sharp, that they would cut tobacco; his head dark and bushy like the top of a hill; and there is nothing I can liken his fingers ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... at school, Begging I'll let him learn the fiddle; Another from that precious fool, Miss Pyefinch, with a stupid riddle. ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... course, is the same as a Fellowship anywhere else. He went into residence at his new home in January, 1871, and remained there for thirteen years, a "don," indeed, by office, but so undonnish in character, ways, and words, that he became the subject of a eulogistic riddle: "When is a don not a don? When he ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... a riddle to me," answered Captain Langless. "We are not in the business of carrying prisoners. We are bound for Sandusky for a ...
— The Rover Boys on the Great Lakes • Arthur M. Winfield
... consider this loft as their Land of Goshen. When I took up my quarters among them they were annoyed, and also puzzled. They could not understand why I remained there so long and so quiet; but at length they lost patience and gave up the riddle. Then their impudence became unbounded; they helped themselves to the maize whenever they felt disposed to do so, and stared at me with the utmost effrontery as they sat upon their haunches nibbling; they ran races under the tiles and held pitched battles ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... But "From Papa" caught my eye on a little parcel. I seized it and unfolded. From papa, and he so far away! But I guessed the riddle before I could get to the last of the folds of paper that wrapped and enwrapped a little morocco case. Papa and mamma, leaving me alone, had made provision beforehand, that when this time came I might miss nothing except themselves. They had thought and cared ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... catch sight of them," said Mr. Edison, "we shall have to riddle the car on the chance ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... make himself understood; but Tifto endeavoured to read the riddle. He must in some way make money out of his friend Lord Silverbridge. Hitherto he had contented himself with the brilliancy of the connection; but now his brilliant friend had taken to snubbing him, and had on more than one occasion made himself disagreeable. It ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... and motives of Judas remain an unsolved riddle. The Gospels leave no doubt that money played a part with him. But could a man whom Jesus selected and trusted be actuated by so sordid a motive alone? Was he perhaps embittered because he had staked his ambition on the ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... Just to hold, to clasp her once against his breast, Hers to flee him, to elude him in the game. Ah, she fears him overmuch! Is it jest,— Is it earnest? a strange riddle lurks half-guessed In her horror ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... met—indeed he knew scarcely as much. He told the brief story to Doctor Mary in the parlor. She heard him listlessly; all that was not much to the point on which her thoughts were set, and did not answer the riddle which the scene in the Tower put to her. She was calm now—and ashamed that she had ever ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... this service to his daughter well before him as the proper direction of his young friend's leisure, the cool darkness had again closed round him, but his moral lucidity was constituted. It wasn't only moreover that the word, with a click, so fitted the riddle, but that the riddle, in such perfection, fitted the word. He might have been equally in want and yet not have had his remedy. Oh, if Charlotte didn't accept him, of course the remedy would fail; but, as everything had fallen together, it was at least there to be tried. And success would ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... riddle that I could not read. Among my last actions of this day was one that had been almost my earliest, and bedtime found me staring at his letter, as I stood, half undressed, by my table. The calm moon brought back Udolpho and what had ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... he was in some ways more of a riddle than ever. He talked curiously little about the war—at least to her. He had a way of finding out, both at Chicksands and Mannering, men who had lost sons in France, and when he and Beryl took a walk, it seemed to Beryl as though ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ascertain if any of the houses were known to me, and found three, out of the whole number, to be the residences of persons whom I knew. One was a German gentleman, and the other two were Americans who had visited Germany. The riddle was read! During a former residence in New York, I had for a time been quite overrun by destitute Germans,—men, apparently, of some culture, who represented themselves as theological students, political refugees, or unfortunate clerks and secretaries,—soliciting ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... the broken ship's lantern. He traces the angle with his finger. The gesture ends with an accusing finger pointing at Red Joe. He whistles softly. For a moment his eye rests upon the gun, which leans against the clock. He has guessed the riddle. He advances casually, but with dirk in hand. He comes in front of Joe. Suddenly he presses the blade of ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... enough bombardment of this sort was certain to reduce the panels to splinters and leave the way clear—if they didn't riddle Gray with bullets ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... the balsam of magic blossoms that intoxicates thee—flowers of a strange and distant world where I am at home and not a stranger as in this book[12] where a ravenous tiger devours the delicate image of spiritual love. I do not understand this cruel riddle; I cannot comprehend why they all make themselves unhappy and why they all serve a malicious demon with a thorny sceptre, why Charlotte, who strews incense before him daily, yes, hourly, should prepare misfortune for them ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... with light, seems almost resembled be an ethereal existence. The dark-blue eyes had an expression of soul and feeling which attracted even the simple domestics at the hall. The physician assured them that her chest was sound, and that her malady was to him a riddle. A beautiful summer, he thought, would work beneficially ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... it all looks again! Oh, I love this old kitchen so! Baby dear, only look at it wid him pitty, pitty eyes, and him tongue out of his mousy! But who put the flour-riddle up there. And look at the pestle and mortar, and rust I declare in the patty pans! And a book, positively a dirty book, where the clean skewers ought to ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... riddle for you: How many o's are there in Woolloomooloo? Two for the W, two for the m, Four for the l's, ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... of "Codex Exoniensis," some of which continue to puzzle the readers of our day, are also considered by some as his: one of the riddles is said to contain a charade on his name, but there are doubts; ample discussions have taken place, and authorities disagree: "The eighty-sixth riddle, which concerns a wolf and a sheep, was related," said Dietrich, "to Cynewulf;" but Professor Morley considers that this same riddle "means the overcoming of the Devil by the hand of God." Stopford Brooke, "Early English Literature," chap. xxii. Many of those riddles were adapted from the Latin ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... mother, the son forsook Corinth, and made his abode at Thebes. Meeting Laius in a narrow pass, and provoked by his attendants, he slew them and him. At Thebes there was a female monster, the Sphinx, who propounded a riddle, and each day devoured a man until it should be solved. Oedipus won the prize which the Queen Jocaste had offered; namely, the crown and her own hand to whomsoever should free the city. When his two sons and ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... confusion, and he gave vent to his merriment, which by no means relieved me. "Shall I give you some good advice?" continued Gulab-Sing, changing his tone for a more serious one. "Don't trouble your head with such vain speculations. The day when this riddle yields its solution, the Rajput Sphinx will not seek destruction in the waves of the sea; but, believe me, it won't bring any profit to the Russian Oedipus either. You already know every detail you ever will learn. So leave the rest ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... the queen sharply. "Thy wits are addled. Who is there who will read the riddle clearly? Thou, ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... searchings and our probings, who knows more of the human heart to-day than the old Psalmist? And what is the problem of government but one of human nature? What Burbank has as yet made grapes to grow on thorns or figs on thistles? The riddle of the universe is no nearer solution than it was when the Sphinx first looked upon the Nile. The one constant and inconstant quantity with which man must deal is man. Human nature responds so far as we can see to the same magnetic pull and push that moved it in the days of Abraham and of Socrates. ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... sheep-stealer named Alastair Bane. Little is known of his boyhood. He was supposed to have been brought to the district by Highlanders who were in the habit of bringing to Crieff cartloads of split pine from Rannoch Forest, which they sold to riddle-makers to make riddle rims. During one of those visits the child is supposed to have been left. He was called Alastair, owing to his supposed Highland descent, and Bane, because of his white hair. As he grew up to manhood he showed symptoms of a wandering disposition, and went ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... perversely, in my mind, now at the end, I know not whether I mean the Thought for the Fancy—or the Fancy for the Thought, or why the book trails off to playing, rather than standing strong on unanswering fact. But this is alway—is it not?—the Riddle of Life. ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... gate is open let no one bar the one you guard. While the flag flies over the public school, keep it aloft over Ellis Island and have no misgivings. The school has the answer to your riddle. ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... is said to have visited Solomon, "to prove him with hard questions," by which have generally been understood enigmatical puzzles. Some of these are to be found in sacred writ, of which the riddle which Samson proposed to the young men of Timnath, is a very ancient and curious specimen. It appears from the writings of the ancients, that the Greeks and all the Eastern nations, were singularly attached to enigmas. Plutarch, in his Feast of the Seven Sages, introduces the following ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... came home, his wife said to him, "Cassim, I know you think yourself rich, but you are much mistaken; Ali Baba is infinitely richer than you; he does not count his money but measures it." Cassim desired her to explain the riddle, which she did, by telling him the stratagem she had used to make the discovery, and shewed him the piece of money, which was so old that they could not tell in what prince's reign ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... days of my youth, a newspaper, "The Pall Mall Gazette," then conducted by W. T. Stead, made a conscientious effort to solve the riddle by inviting a number of eminent men to compile lists of the Hundred Best Books. Now this invitation rested on a fallacy. Considering for a moment how personal a thing is Literature, you will promptly assure yourselves ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... direction I turned, I felt that, if I listened to the reasoning of liberal Oxford, I was confronted with an absurdity of one kind or another. Of the only liberal answers attempted to the riddle of life, not one, it seemed to me, would bear a moment's serious criticism; and yet, unless the orthodox doctrines could be defended in such a way that in all their traditional strictness they could once more compel assent, life, ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... of Chases, Lowes, and Baileys, All claiming some priority in Starkness. My mother was a Lane, yet might have married Anyone upon earth and still her children Would have been Starks, and doubtless here to-day." "You riddle with your genealogy Like a Viola. I don't follow you." "I only mean my mother was a Stark Several times over, and by marrying father No more than brought us back into the name." "One ought not to be ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... and the last named had sighted Victoria Nyanza. Returning to East Africa with J. A. Grant, Speke reached, in 1862, the river which flowed from Victoria Nyanza, and following it (in the main) down to Egypt, had the distinction of being the first man to read the riddle of the Nile. In 1864 another Nile explorer, Samuel Baker, discovered the Albert Nyanza, the chief western reservoir of the river. In 1866 Livingstone began his last great journey, in which he made known Lakes ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... taken twenty-thousand francs from Richard's pocket in spite of the safety-pin. He replied that he had not gone into this little detail, but that, if I myself cared to make an investigation on the spot, I should certainly find the solution to the riddle in the managers' office by remembering that Erik had not been nicknamed the trap-door lover for nothing. I promised the Persian to do so as soon as I had time, and I may as well tell the reader at once that the results of my investigation were perfectly satisfactory; and I hardly believed ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... lost secrets of the world," replies the baronet. But I can hardly understand a learned Orientalist speaking in that way about what appears to me a very patent circumstance: it is clear that he never earnestly applied himself to the solution of the riddle, or else—what is more likely, in spite of his rather high-flown estimate of his own "Reason"—that his mind, and the mind of his ancestors, never was able to go farther back in time than the Edmundsbury Monks. ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... definition of teacher. I find that I'm one who teaches or instructs. Think of it—I! That definition should be revised to read, 'Teacher: one who, conveying certain information to others, reads in fifty faces unanswerable questions as to the riddle of existence.' 'School: a place where the presumably wise are convinced of their own folly.' Note well, my friend: I am a gray sister, in a gray serge suit that fits, with white cuffs and collar, and with chalk on my fingers. Oh, ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... visible was a water-lily, swaying on the water amid its broad leaves. But a swaying flower could not sing, and there must be something mysterious about it. He tied his horse to a stump on the bank, and sat down on the bridge to listen, hoping that his eyes or ears would give him some solution of the riddle. All was still for a while, but presently the invisible ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... is the western gate, Luke Havergal, There are the crimson leaves upon the wall. Go, — for the winds are tearing them away, — Nor think to riddle the dead words they say, Nor any more to feel them as they fall; But go! and if you trust her she will call. There is the western gate, Luke Havergal ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... me. My interviewing days are over. I believe if I keep on getting better at the rate I've been going the last week, I shall be able to write a play this summer, besides doing my work for the Abstract. If I could do that, and it succeeded, the riddle would be ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... guard, defense, traverse, fender; mask, disguise; sieve, riddle; jube, parclose, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... man," said William, greatly interested, but still suspicious. "One riddle only I ask thee to solve, before I give thee all my trust, and place my very heart in thy hands. Why, if thou desirest not rewards, shouldst thou thus care to serve me—thou, a foreigner?" A light, brilliant and calm, shone in ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... riddle. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what it was. I cannot tell any one what it was. I undertook to find the answer. From France the riddle took me far away to another country—and there, after a year's work, I found half the answer. The other half is in London. ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... has become a meaningless riddle and uninteresting to most people because it is not rightly divided. It is assumed that all parts of the Bible are addressed to everybody. This is far from the truth. While we must recognize the unity and interdependence of the entire Bible and that each part ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... a riddle; you are not one, you are two men; and they fight the whole time. But I know the wiser one is winning and I think the best friend you ever had was that big fellow that threatened you with the 'bone-rot' if ever you broke your ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... willing, in an earlier youth, to read this riddle in somewhat crude solutions. I think we have each of us arrived, and in a final manner, at the sounder conclusion that historical accident is principally to blame. The chance concurrence of this defeat with that dynastic influence, the slip by which the common sense of political simplicity missed ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... cried the lady, petulantly, "I'll have no nerves left me." She turned to the letter again, holding it very near to her eyes, and made a wry face of impatience. Then she held the sheet out to Mr. Riddle. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... she had left her watch, and I had peace of mind to note how thin and worn she had become, as if her baby was grown too big for her slight arms, even then I was light-hearted. Without attempting to follow her, I sauntered homeward humming a snatch of song with a great deal of fal-de-lal-de-riddle-o in it, for I can never remember words. I saw her enter another shop, baby linen shop or some nonsense of that sort, so it was plain for what she had popped her watch; but what cared I? I continued to sing most beautifully. I lunged gayly with ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... said the driver, and Bob had solved the riddle. He then told Mr. Waterman how he had tried to think what "Gi-may" meant, thinking at first that it meant something like "Allons" but that he had found out it was ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... of the man at the window for an answer to the riddle. But Matheson's face was set, and the answer to the riddle was such as Lars Larssen could never have guessed. It lay outside the shipowner's pale of thought—beyond the ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... weakness—never attain to the proper mountain spirit. There is a further point, however, in which they also recall Derbyshire, but in which they are far preeminent. This is the vast agglomeration of caves and vertical potholes—like those in Craven, but here called etonnoirs—that riddle the rolling wolds in all directions. Chief among these is the mammoth cave of Han, the mere perambulation of which is said to occupy more than two hours. I have never penetrated myself into its sombre and dank recesses, but something may ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... use), it was found that we had greatly undervalued the treasure. When, at length, we had concluded our examination, and the intense excitement of the time had, in some measure, subsided, Legrand, who saw that I was dying with impatience for a solution of this most extraordinary riddle, entered into a full detail of all ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... speculating, for there is a kind of fatality that concerns the disposition of matter in Nature. Oil fields and rubber trees existed, one might say, as enigmas, until the internal combustion engine and motor cars dawned on the world and explained their riddle. This was their fate. And of Mesopotamia, who shall say that it may not be concerned with a yet unborn attitude in us Europeans when we will turn wholly to the ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... him, and he sat perfectly erect upon his horse, with the pike-shaft resting upon his toe, as he told himself that he hoped if the men fired they would miss; that before he would run away, with Scar Markham to laugh at his flight, they might riddle him with bullets through ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... that the solution of that origin proposed recently by Sir John Lubbock is a mere version of simple utilitarianism, appealing to the pleasure or safety of the individual, and therefore utterly incapable of solving the riddle it attacks. ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... meaning of the curious structure of the leaves of Trifolium resupinatum remains a riddle. The stomata and (speaking from memory) the trichomes differ on the two ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... touched them with his refining art and has spoiled them. The playwright has striven to transfer from the field to the stage a cotton-picking scene and has made a travesty of it. To transfer the passions of man and to music-riddle them is an art with stiff-jointed rules, but the charm of a cotton-picking scene is an essence, and is breathed but cannot be caught. Here seems to lie a sentiment that no other labor invites, and though ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... Dermot found the riddle too difficult to solve. He ceased to puzzle over it. The noises in the forest gradually died down, and the intense silence that followed was broken only by the harsh call of the barking-deer or the wailing cry of the ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... something 'ere which was found on the top of his portmanteau. I wot ye know not the use of this." To the Barbarian's intense indignation, the Cicerone produced, from under his, his (the Barbarian's) own opera hat. "Marry, what should be this? Read me this riddle! To it—and unyoke!" ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... thirty the face of a woman is a book written in a foreign tongue, which one may still translate in spite of all the feminisms of the idiom; but on passing her fortieth year a woman becomes an insoluble riddle; and if any one can see through an old woman, it is another ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... not conceive what possible object the Japanese could have in drawing across the land, with so much trouble, boats of no inconsiderable size. We concluded, at last, that they must have seen our vessel, and feared lest they should lose their prize. But the solution of the riddle was soon apparent, for when they had got the boats up to the top of the hill, they allowed them to slide down the other side by the force of their own gravity, and then launched them on a small stream, which, after having navigated for two days, we left in order to continue ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... for both, but they intended to solve them that day, to see which way the riddle ran, and the Wilderness itself was as dark, as calm and as somber as ever. It had been torn by cannon balls, pierced by rifle bullets and scorched by fire; but the two armies were yet buried in it and it gave no ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... with Pablo at her heels, Bill Conway unburdened himself of a slightly ribald little chanson entitled: "What Makes the Wild Cat Wild?" In the constant repetition of this query it appeared that the old Californian sought the answer to a riddle not even remotely connected with the ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... her laughter. "Here's a riddle," she said. "The brownie you locked into the stable that night always makes the butter. He isn't never thanked nor yet paid, but you've looked him in the face scores ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... penny, but I zaid five poun'. The wager was laid, but the money not down. Zinging right fol de ree, fol de riddle lee While I am a-zinging ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... without the other. I believe that I have clearly shown in my Science of Thought that thought without word and word without thought are impossible and inconceivable, and why it is so. Here is the first key to a historical solution of the riddle at the beginning of the Fourth Gospel. We know that Greek philosophy after making every possible effort to explain the world mechanically, had already in the school of Anaxagoras reached the view that the hylozoic as well as the atomic theory leaves the human mind unsatisfied; and that it ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... when what thou sayest would have been as a riddle to me, and I would have said: Here are we merry, though we be few; and if ye lack more company, let me ride to the Tofts and come back with a half score of lads and lasses, and thus let us eke our mirth; and maybe they will tell us whitherward to ride. But now there is a ...
— Child Christopher • William Morris
... no more, She brooded often on this riddle— Alas! 'twas darker than before! At last about the summer's middle, What Johnson, Mrs. Bond, or none did, To clear the ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Princess's answer to the riddle of the nineteenth day in A Digit of the Moon. I am this middle thing, and it is only the very bad and very good that achieve peace and ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... commercial necessity. For those who have opium, cocaine, veronal, or heroin to sell can always find a ready market in London and elsewhere. But one sufficiently curious and clever enough to have solved the riddle of the vacant wharf would have discovered that the mysterious owner who showed himself so loath to accept reasonable offers for the property could well afford to be thus independent. Those who control "the traffic" control El Dorado—a city of gold which, unlike the fabled ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer |
