"Enigma" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of yours, friend Edie, is an absolute enigma, and would require a second OEdipus to solve itwho OEdipus was, I will tell you some other time if you remind meHowever, whether it be owing to the wisdom or to the maggots with which you compliment me, I am strongly disposed to believe that you have spoken the truth, the rather ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... in the room but from their appearance it seemed as if they had struck nothing, evidently the bullets would have been changed in shape if they had impinged upon any hard substance. But then this was another enigma. How did the bullets come back? No man could have put the bullets there from before, (for they were still hot when discovered) or could have guessed the bore of the revolver that was going to ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... under the seal of his own signature, the contrary of what he has written, thought, or felt. To do this is an offence almost amounting to a moral crime." I write more at length on this topic to my friends of the Place Louis Quinze, and I beg you to speak to none but them of my enigma, which assuredly you have already solved; I hope that what has now offended and vexed me will not happen again. In saying what was necessary, I used very guarded expressions. I do not wish a rupture, the vengeance ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... untold misery; but a theocratic government, thoroughly equipped, unanimously responsive in all its branches, far-reaching in its designs and expanding as rapidly as that of the Mormon church, presents a great political enigma to the American people even when shorn of its most obnoxious feature. Congress and the country at large have their attention fixed upon the question of polygamy, and the proposed legislative commission, if endorsed by Congress, would bring the Mormon Church itself face to face with it. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... branches of their industry; the different objects of their trade; the nature of that sagacity which, deprived as they are of every necessary material, produce, etc., yet enables them to flourish, to live well, and sometimes to make considerable fortunes. The whole is an enigma to be solved only by coming to the spot and observing the national genius which the original founders brought with them, as well as their unwearied patience and perseverance. They have all, from the highest to the lowest, a singular keenness of judgment, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... John Poley (Vol. i., p. 214. and 372.).—Your correspondent GASTROS suggests that "to the Low Countries, the land of frogs, we must turn for the solution of this enigma," (Vol. i., p. 372.); accordingly, it appears from the treatise of Bircherodius on the Knights of the Elephant, an order of knighthood in Denmark, conferred upon none but persons of the first quality and merit, that a frog is among the devices adopted ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... red-eyed ships of the Phoenician traders were founding trading posts among the barbarians of the coast of Valencia. And there they stand on their shelves, the real and the false inextricably muddled, and stare at the enigma with ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... perilous fords, tireless, hardy, hungry, frolicked along ledges of precipices and over crevassed glaciers, was absolutely fearless, and his slender legs and the use he made of them were the marvel of all. He was an enigma to the end. He was quite untamable, rejected all dainties with indignation, swung his heels into people's faces when they went near him, ran at them with his teeth, seized unwary passers-by by their kamar bands, and shook them as a dog shakes a rat, would ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... courtly Rex was an enigma. In her own mind she liked him all the better because he had not fallen down and worshiped her at once. Most ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... real poverty a thing of the past. Disappointment, however, after disappointment has followed. Discovery upon discovery, invention after invention, have neither lessened the toil of those who most need respite nor brought plenty to the poor. The association of poverty with progress is the great enigma ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... belonging to the high priests at Jerusalem, and this, too, made the Jews smart uncomfortably. (12) The Persian king had wanted to mount the throne of Solomon besides, but herein he was thwarted, because its ingenious construction was an enigma to him. Egyptian artificers tried to fashion a throne after the model of Solomon's, but in vain. After two years' work they managed to produce a weak imitation of it, and upon this Ahasuerus sat during his ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... Ah, that was it! But where had he gone? Why should he rise up in the middle of the night, take the flock and dogs, and steal off in this noiseless fashion? The boy could not solve the enigma. ...
— The Story of Wool • Sara Ware Bassett
... there was no mystery in their neither sending nor receiving letters. But where did they get their groceries? I do not mean the money to pay for them—that is an enigma apart—but the groceries themselves. No express wagon, no butcher's cart, no vehicle of any description, was ever observed to stop at their domicile. Yet they did not order family stores at the sole establishment in the village—an inexhaustible little ...
— Our New Neighbors At Ponkapog • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... brush fantastical, And of imperial idleness, Your fellah-sphinx presents us all With an enigma worth the guess. ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... the Old-World belief that land, in itself, is desirable. But this land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces. He had an idea that no one understood how to farm it properly, and this he often discussed with Alexandra. Their neighbors, certainly, knew even less about farming than he ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... vocation enigma over again, Charlie, isn't it? But don't let it make you miserable, and don't ever say such a thing as that you just said again. Do you know, when I came to you in the hospital that morning, I had not slept one moment for two long days and nights! Now try and be ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... here the motives for this change, because we believe it is very difficult to lift the veil which covers the mysteries of the political inconstancy of the Cabinet of St. James's; and leaving the solution of this enigma to time, that great OEdipus of history, we will here make only this remark, that English diplomacy has allowed a favourable opportunity to escape for taking the initiative in all the great questions which concern the general ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... extraordinary," said Lady Keith, "how after living among a parcel of thick-headed and thicker tongued Yankees she could come out and speak pure English in a clear voice; it is an enigma ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... fresh and candid, so elegant, so violent and complete a contrast to James Ollerenshaw; so absurdly sagacious and sure of herself, and perhaps because of a curve in her cheek, and a mysterious suggestion of eternal enigma in her large and liquid eye. When she looked right away from him, as she sometimes did in the conversation, the outline of her soft cheek, which drew in at the eye and swelled out again to the temple, resembled a map of the coast of some ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... great-grandfather, an Oliverian justice. "These," says he, "I conveyed to my lodging-room, and there became acquainted with the manners and principles of many excellent old Puritans, and then laid the foundation of my own." The enigma is now solved! Archdeacon BLACKBURNE, in his seclusion in Yorkshire amidst the Oliverian justice's library, shows that we are in want of a Cervantes but not of a Quixote, and Yorkshire might yet be as renowned a country as La Mancha; for ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... discovery upon earth, where the materials are in our own hands. But it was soon shown how spectrum analysis might be applied to the investigation of the sun and stars; and this result was reached through the solution of a problem which had been long an enigma to natural philosophers. The scope and conquest of this problem we must now endeavour to comprehend. A spectrum is pure in which the colours do not overlap each other. We purify the spectrum by making our beam narrow, and by augmenting the number of our ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... to his feet slowly. His face was an enigma. The Rajput stood at attention facing him and they met each other's eyes—East facing West—in such fashion that manhood seemed to fill the smoky room. Every one was silent. Even Maga held her breath. Monty strode toward Rustum Khan; the Rajput was ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... lady vainly sought some solution of the enigma—why she had been brought thither. She could not solve it; but she determined, if her capture had been made by any lawful authorities, to confess her guilt and submit ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was something of an enigma to Hector Strong. He was making more than a million pounds a year, and yet she did not want to marry him. Sometimes he wondered if the woman were quite sane. Yet, mad or sane, ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... silence fell over the little party. After the first few moments of dismay, conjecture, and exclamation, there did not seem to be much that any one could say. Each girl was busy with her own thoughts and private interpretation of a most sorrowful enigma. What were they to do? How were they to live without separation, and without taking a solitary plunge into an unknown and most ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... at the head of the little household soberly settled there. Never were princesses and women more unlike than Caroline of Brunswick and Victoria of Coburg; But poor Queen Caroline was not destined to remain long an awkward enigma—a queen and yet no queen, an aunt and yet no aunt, a scandal and a torment ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... and possessing such simplicity of tastes,—an enigma, I grant, to an age like ours, as indeed it may have been to his,—Jerome bade adieu to the honors and luxuries and excitements of the great city (without which even a Cicero languished), and embarked at Ostia, A.D. 385, for those regions consecrated by the sufferings of Christ. Two years afterwards, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... expected to jump into a whirlwind of instantaneous applause is an enigma. Nothing that is out of the conventional rut succeeds at the start. There must be patience, perseverance and a struggle. Otherwise life would be very easy, which it is not. The rosy little scheme at the ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... feeling more than ever that his guest was an enigma. But he was too busy to stop just ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... this apparently insoluble enigma lies in the fact that the building of the bridge had only then been begun—the bridge of Manas, or mind, destined to unite in the perfected individual the upward surging forces of the animal and the downward cycling spirit of the God. The animal kingdom of to-day exhibits ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... readers who have lived since Browning's first publication have seen as many attitudes taken toward one of the ablest poetic spirits of the century. To the first he appeared an enigma, a writer hopelessly obscure, perhaps not even clear in his own mind, as to the message he wished to deliver; to the second he appeared a prophet and a philosopher, full of all wisdom and subtlety, too ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... enigma—a deceiver, Ivan Mikhailovitch! Here it is a week since you arrived. You profess to know no one. But you managed immediately to join quarters with me; and now "—he stopped, turning from the wind to light his cigarette—"now, on the ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... ballast, and such like, for the repairs of the harbour; they does all the rough and dirty jobs as is to be done about the works and place—indeed, we calls 'em the Port Admiral's skippers." I now fully understood the import of the term Portsmouth Greys, which had before been an enigma to 183me; and comprehended that the unhappy beings before me ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... here a barrier chamber (cf. the notes which he has appended to the English translation of my Archeologie egyptienne, p. 327, note 27,) but he confesses that the arrangement of the grooves and of the flagstone is still an enigma to him. Perhaps only one of the four intended barriers was inserted in its place—that which ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... matters, studying some agreeable surprise for her husband, and trying for his sake to be very neat and orderly. Then when the clock pointed the hour for his return, she would station herself at the gate, and William, as he kissed the moisture from her rosy cheek, thought her a perfect enigma to weep when he went away, and ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... to these meetings, pursuing their own humble duties, indifferent to the follies of fashionable society. The fencing schools flourished—what memories cluster around that odd, strange master of the blade, Spedella, a melancholy enigma of a man, whose art embodied much of the finest shading and phrasing peculiar to himself; from whom even many of Bonaparte's discarded veterans were not above acquiring new technique and temperament! Men in those days were most punctilious about ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... feelings in the unequivocal language of love! Yet she seemed so hideously unhappy as she stretched before him in her white robes of death. Why? What secret was this disclosed at the twelfth hour of life, on the very brink of the grave? Did death, then, hold the solution to the enigma of the conquering Sphinx! ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... mansion, but could have prepared a list of the out-door employees as well. He stood there, calm and impassive as Fate, and, without knowing it, represented Fate in her most inexorable mood; for had he betaken himself elsewhere, the shrewdest brains of Scotland Yard might have been defeated by the enigma they were asked to solve before Mortimer Fenley's murderer ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... was a relief to her mind, and it seemed an enigma that Barbara, whose beauty increased her interest, and whom the physician had extolled as a famous singer, could have given her confidence, in her days of health, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is but a specimen of the jargon and slang of Ghibelline freemasonry. When Italians write thus, they degrade the greatest name of their country to a depth of laborious imbecility, to which the trifling of schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to solve the enigma of Dante's works by imagining for him a character in which it is hard to say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank, or infidel. After that we may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's historic doubts. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the dull enigma, We shall 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 ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... Narrow natures expand by persecuting as much as others through beneficence; they prove their power over their fellows by cruel tyranny as others do by loving kindness; they simply go the way their temperaments drive them. Add to this the propulsion of self-interest and you may read the enigma of most ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... ideas of the last century which had almost exclusively considered the action of the "legislator." But what in its turn did these "conditions of property" depend on? Guizot is unable to answer this question, and after long, vain efforts to find a solution of the enigma in historical circumstances, he returns, falls back nolens volens, upon the theory of human nature. Augustin Thierry, another eminent historian of the Restoration, found himself in almost the same case, or rather he would have done so if only he had tried to investigate ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... I came here, eh?" In a flash he had solved the enigma. "It is as I imagined. Have you the ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... never awaken the phantasy of this malevolent thing. The perfect government of woman is a task to rend a man's heart, and we are compelled to remain in perfect submission to them; that is, I imagine, the best manner in which to solve the most agonising enigma of marriage. ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... wholly forgotten by her, and he stepped silently away to join another of his guests. The new English girl presented an enigma to him, but it was one in which he did not take much interest. All her fairness notwithstanding, she was not even pretty, according to his standard, and he had seen a good ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... broken sleigh with rifled boxes and papers scattered about. Near them were also torn garments and bodies. Who were these pitiful ones? What tragedy was staged in this wild wood? We tried to guess this enigma and we began to investigate the documents and papers. These were official papers addressed to the Staff of General Pepelaieff. Probably one part of the Staff during the retreat of Kolchak's army went through this wood, striving to hide from the enemy approaching ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... MR. CROSSLEY—than whom no one is more competent—would favour us with such an article. The following communication from MR. FORBES is only one of several we have received, showing that the interest in this enigma ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... to explain in detail the whole enigma of first love. But a general explanation is suggested by evolutional philosophy,—namely, that the attraction depends upon an inherited individual susceptibility to special qualities of feminine influence, and subjectively represents a kind ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... ones, together with their own youngsters, Goethe grew quite excited about this fact. He saw in it a confirmation of his pantheistic views, and said:—"If it be true that this feeding of a stranger goes through all Nature as something having the character of a general law—then many an enigma would be solved. "He returned to this matter on the next day, and most earnestly entreated Eckermann (who was, as is known, a zoologist) to make a special study of the subject, adding that he would surely come ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... sake of brevity, to compress—we have the suggestion of Pascal’s philosophy both of human nature and of Divine revelation. He recurs over and over again to the same idea, that man is great and yet weak, full of capacity and yet miserable, and that the Gospel alone holds the key to this enigma of human nature. This, more than any other, is the pervading thought round which ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... time: Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem; wherein nevertheless there seemeth to be a liberty granted, as far forth as the polishing of this glass, or some moderate explication of this enigma. But to press too far into it cannot but cause a dissolution and overthrow of the spirit of man. For in the body there are three degrees of that we receive into it—aliment, medicine, and poison; whereof aliment ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... not understand—the relation between the spark of eternity in your soul and the Power above, and the whole of endless space—has all of a sudden become so clear that you lie here trembling with joy at seeing to the very bottom of the infinite enigma. ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... well in Mr. Meeker's case, Honora had previously applied to others of his sex. Like most people with a future, she began young. Of late, for instance, Mr. George Hanbury had shown a tendency to regard her as his personal property; for George had a high-handed way with him,—boys being an enigma to his mother. Even in those days he had a bullet head and a red face and square shoulders, and was rather undersized for his age—which ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... following from a friend in the quaint spirit in which it is written, and understand not by bad company aught that is evil—for if we read the word of the enigma, the 'bad' among her 'friends of the future' is indeed goodness-that saving salt which is often found among many who are too hastily banned as lost in the world. So, we pray you, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Would you like us to go down to Monsieur de Saint-Aignan's rooms? Perhaps we shall be able to find the solution of the enigma there." ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... moment, as if seeking to unravel some enigma, then she smiled and shook her head with a little fugitive shadow ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... muse to journalism, humiliating Art, as woman was humiliated and prostituted in those shameless galleries without, and the provincial took a terrible lesson to heart. Money! That was the key to every enigma. Lucien realized the fact that he was unknown and alone, and that the fragile clue of an uncertain friendship was his sole guide to success and fortune. He blamed the kind and loyal little circle for painting the world for him in false colors, for preventing him ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... Kathlyn went the rounds of the cages. She was a veritable enigma to Bruce. Tigers lost their tenseness and looked straight into her eyes. A cheetah with cubs permitted her to touch the wabbly infants, whereas the keeper of this cage dared not go within a foot of it. By the time ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... warning, nor reproach. They hope all things, believe all things, trust all things, and make shipwreck on the breakers that all eyes but their own see leaping and foaming in their course. Yes, woman is truly an enigma! ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... attentive enough, by this time, and every eye was turned, not unkindly, upon the youth who had so long been an enigma to them all—except, perhaps, ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... President of the Royal Society I cannot precisely say. Let him who penned, and those who supported this resolution solve the enigma: ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... had started the previous evening, and had only returned an hour since. He was charming. Whether he kept a watch over himself, or whether by accident he did not sound the acrimonious chords that in other circumstances had been touched, he was to-night like everybody else. The man was an enigma to Franz. The count must feel sure that Franz recognized him; and yet he had not let fall a single word indicating any previous acquaintance between them. On his side, however great Franz's desire was to allude to their former ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... I knew," returned the colonel. "If there were any birds around here big enough we might suspect that one of them had carried him off, but we will evidently have to await Pepper's own explanation of the enigma." Then he ...
— The Boy Scouts Patrol • Ralph Victor
... inarticulate cries. These men have not justified to us their confidence. It will be shared, not justified. They have divined what they cannot orderly publish, and their meaning will be by the same greatness divined again. The work of such men remains a haunting, commanding enigma to following ages. They do but repeat the promise and obscurity of Nature, for she herself has the same largeness, is such another raptus, proceeding to no end, but to a circle or complexity of ends. Men are again and again divided over the images of Paul, of Plato, of Dante, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... subsiding into anxious inquiry; still above them are those who, having caught a gleam of the sources of consolation, express in their faces a solemn calmness; and still higher, rising in the air, figures with clasped hands, and absorbed, upward gaze, to whose eye the mystery has been unveiled, the enigma solved, and sorrow glorified. One among these, higher than the rest, with a face of rapt adoration, seems entering the ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... his words. Was he at last going to find out the truth? Was he going to solve this enigma and discover the name of his family, the land of his birth? Truly the scene appeared to him almost chimerical. He fastened his eyes upon the wounded man, ready to drink in his words with avidity. For nothing in the world would he have interfered with his recital, ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... to the good of her husband, home and family, was as willing and honorable as the man's self-surrender to the good of his lord and country. Self-renunciation, without which no life-enigma can be solved, was the keynote of the Loyalty of man as well as of the Domesticity of woman. She was no more the slave of man than was her husband of his liege-lord, and the part she played was recognized as Naijo, ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... most admire. The whole character is the triumph of the external over the innate; and yet like one of her country's hieroglyphics, though she present at first view a splendid and perplexing anomaly, there is deep meaning and wondrous skill in the apparent enigma, when we come to analyze and decipher it. But how are we to arrive at the solution of this glorious riddle, whose dazzling complexity continually mocks and eludes us? What is most astonishing in the character of Cleopatra is its antithetical construction—its consistent inconsistency, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... and upright soul of Peter was in torture. He made a sign to John to endeavor to ascertain of whom the Master spoke. John, who could converse with Jesus without being heard, asked him the meaning of this enigma. Jesus having only suspicions, did not wish to pronounce any name; he only told John to observe to whom he was going to offer a sop. At the same time he soaked the bread and offered it to Judas. John and Peter alone ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... to hover about the enigma of the scarlet letter seemed an innate quality of her being. From the earliest epoch of her conscious life, she had entered upon this as her appointed mission. Hester had often fancied that Providence had a design of justice and retribution, in endowing the child with this marked propensity; ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... should be added that, stirring and eloquent as were the opening sentences, they were not listened to by the House with that extraordinary enthusiasm which, on other occasions, sentences of this splendid eloquence would have elicited. For what really the House wanted to learn was the great enigma which had been kept for seven long years—in spite of protests, hypocritical appeals, and, ofttimes, tedious remonstrance from ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... identical with ours, was much closer than the tortured dialect of the Eastenders of the Isle of Wight. The longer I talked with her the more hopeful I became of finding here, among her people, some records, or traditions, which might assist in clearing up the historic enigma of the past two centuries. I asked her if we were far from the city of London, but she did not know what I meant. When I tried to explain, describing mighty buildings of stone and brick, broad avenues, parks, palaces, ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... only of their one fixed stare? Why is it then that their motionless regard surprises and chills us, even while we are obsessed by the smile of the sealed lips that seem to hold back the answer to the supreme enigma? . . . ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... arrested by observing a kind of opening under a little arbor, thickly covered with a mat of vines. Thinking, perhaps, that it was the retreat of some animal, he thrust in his hand, and to his surprise drew forth a glass bottle, partly full of whisky. The enigma of his master's walks and inequalities of temper stood immediately deciphered. After the reflection of a moment, he carefully replaced the bottle in its position, and returned to his place in school. In the evening ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... the man with a smile, "at any question which aims at the investigation of that great enigma styled the human mind? I am fond of the study of character, and of those principles of good and evil which influence men. Under given circumstances and conditions, the commission of a certain sin is greatly more blameworthy than the commission of the same sin ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... nightmare, this scene just past. What an incredible, a preposterous request for a woman to make! And the more thought he fed to the enigma the more incredible and ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... the great discomfort of maintaining contact with this mind, he extended his explorations in search of the answer. A growing suspicion was quickly confirmed beyond question, explaining at once the sickening deformities of the wasted mind and the enigma of the alternative means of communication. There simply was no adequate communication! From that, all else stemmed. Each of these creatures, these—he searched for the term—these "Man" as they called themselves, was an island, an ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... times—four. Then he began again. He had read them a dozen times before he closed them. He had read them word by word, poring over each character, each turn of phrase, as a man might pore over an enigma or a document written in a foreign language of which he only knew stray words. If his hands had shaken at first, he had not turned a page before his whole body was shaking and his palms, his forehead, his hair ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... slipping along with some chewing-gum between his teeth and a warm sensation in his stew-crammed stomach, whistling, dreaming, happy; youth, that can, without premeditation, remain away from home and leave udders untapped and pigs unfed; sublime enigma; angering bit of irresponsibility to the Martins of a fiercely practical world. Bill was that rare kind of boy who could pull away from the traces just when he seemed most thoroughly broken ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... an enigma as obscure for those who gained it as for him who lost it. To Napoleon it is a panic; Bluecher sees nothing in it but fire; Wellington does not understand it at all. Look at the reports; the bulletins are confused; the commentaries ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... bestowed a happier futurity!" This writer also drew a comparison between Napoleon and Charlemagne, in which he designated the latter a barbarous despot and the former the new savior of the world. He says, "Napoleon first solved the enigma of equality and liberty—his chief aim was the prevention of despotism—his chief desire, to eternalize the dominion of virtue." In the course of 1808, it was said in the essay, "On the Regeneration of Germany," ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... jewels and whose perfect independence was the most precious thing in the world. At his age he could not marry a volcano, a revolution, a new radio-active element exhibiting properties which were an enigma to social science. Concepcion would turn his existence into an endless drama of which she alone, with her deep-rooted, devilish talent for the sensational, would always choose the setting, as she had chosen the ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... through the gates of death! Was it not worthy of a God to, descend to these dim valleys, in order to clear up the clouds gathered over the dark mount beyond—to satisfy the doubts of sages—to convert speculation into certainty—by example to point out the rules of life—by revelation to solve the enigma of the grave—and to prove that the soul did not yearn in vain when it dreamed of an immortality? In this last was the great argument of those lowly men destined to convert the earth. As nothing is more flattering to the pride ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... OF ALEXANDRIA.—In Joann. Evang., 1. ii., c. 5: "For those things which are spoken concerning it [the Divine Nature] are not spoken as they are in very truth, but as the tongue of man can interpret, and as man can hear; for he who sees in an enigma also speaks in ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... ordinary, disproportion between moral worth and worldly prosperity has at all times led the observant and reflecting few to a nicer consideration of the current belief, whether instinctive or traditional. By forcing the soul in upon herself, this enigma of saint and sage, from Job, David, and Solomon to Claudian and Boetius, this perplexing disparity of success and desert, has been the occasion of a steadier and more distinct consciousness of a something in man, different in kind, which distinguishes and contra-distinguishes him from animals—at ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... earth—to me the dearest—the woman I love. In ten days or less, by her own showing, she will be away from it; why should I care for it then? Now, Dona Carmen, I've given you the key to what you've called an enigma." ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... succeed in forming an imperfect and broken system which perplexes men's minds to the extent of making them forget the clearest notions, and to render uncertain the most palpable truths. By the aid of this systematic nonsense, all nature has become an inexplicable enigma for man; the visible world has disappeared to give place to invisible regions; reason is obliged to give place to imagination, which can lead us only to the land of chimeras which she herself ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... perpetration; yet at this moment in possession of the only clue which will enable justice to seize the murderer. Conscious of her innocence, she braves peril that would chill the blood of men, and extort almost any secret; and shall I tell you the reason? Shall I give you the key to an enigma which ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... What it can mean is not easily discovered: if mail for a packet or bag was a word then in use, no salve in the mail may mean, no salve in the mountebank's budget. Or shall we read, no enigma, no riddle, no l'envoy—in the vale, sir—O, sir. plantain. The matter is not great, but one would wish for some ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... sacrificed himself, on his lips, as if it had been an ecstatic prayer, and he intrusted his will 'to the priest who administered extreme unction to him, and requested him to give it to me. In it, without mentioning anybody, and without in the least lifting the veil, he at last explained the enigma, and cleared himself of those accusations the terrible burden of which he had borne ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... possessed, and which Caligula was the earliest to understand. Augustus was the first magistrate of Rome, Tiberius the first citizen. Caligula was the first emperor, but an emperor hallucinated by the enigma of his own grandeur, a prince for whose sovereignty the ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... so, he accepted the challenge of no mere enigma. Of his own volition, he entered upon the path that led through untrod and dangerous ground. It was his problem to cut the Gordian knot of Anglo-Saxon icy reserve that in the end fair England might assume as a policy of world administration the award of citizenship ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... did. It was an enigma which puzzled many wiser heads than his in the long run; but I think the part which astonished him most was to be discovering, bit by bit, that the story of my visit to the house in Monmouth Street, as related to him and his brother, the "tip-top ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... Volume are upon a novel plan, and will, at a glance, convey more information regarding the types of Greek, Roman, and English Coins, than can be obtained by many hours' careful reading. Instead of a fac-simile Engraving being given of that which is already an enigma to the tyro, the most striking and characteristic features of the Coin are dissected and placed by themselves, so that the eye soon becomes ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... who perished in an August afternoon, was a party shibboleth in the Wars of the Saints against the Malignants, the strife of Cavaliers and Roundheads. The problem has ever since attracted the curious, as do the enigma of Perkin Warbeck, the true character of Richard III, the real face behind 'The Iron Mask,' the identity of the False Pucelle, and the innocence or ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... the question, and I wish you would answer it. I've been driving myself wild over it for the past few days, but I don't seem to get to the solution. Can't your Familiar," pointing downward, "help you guess the enigma, Miriam?" ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... awaking for the first time the woman within her heart. Hitherto her girlhood's fancies had been like summer zephyrs, disturbing but briefly the still, clear waters of her soul; but now she became an enigma to herself as she slowly grew conscious of her own heart and the law of her woman's nature to love and give herself to another. But she had too much of the doughty old major's fire and spirit, and was too fond of her freedom, to surrender easily. Both Graham and Mrs. Mayburn were ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... his efforts and hurried back to the long-boat. The spectacle of the girl struggling with the stuff she was jettisoning put new determination into him. Her amazing fortitude at the time when he had looked for hysterics and collapse gave him new light on the enigma of femininity. ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... man he was an enigma to the world, and doubtless to himself: he was bad, but he was bold. If he was vindictive, he was generous; if he was misanthropic and sceptical, it was partly because he despised shams: in all his actions, we see that implicit working out of his ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... mysticism, contradictions, which have made of a science the most obvious and best demonstrated, an unintelligible science, mysterious and uncertain to those for whom it is designed. In the hands of the priests, morality has become an enigma; they have founded our duties on the attributes of a Deity whom the mind of man cannot comprehend, in place of founding them on the character of man himself. They have thrown in among them the foundations of an edifice which is made for this earth. They have desired ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... himself; perhaps there was something in the light in Joan's eyes and in the way in which she sometimes placed her hand upon the hilt of the dagger in her belt which warned him not to try her too far. Joan was something of an enigma to him still. She was like no other woman with whom he had ever come in contact. He did not feel certain what she might say or do. It was rather like treading upon the crust of some volcanic crater to have dealings with her. At any moment something quite unforeseen might take ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... out; and from Mrs. Heron, a woman of some diplomatic talent, he learnt nothing. Once after they were married he asked her, "What made you refuse me so often?" She had answered by a strange silence. An enigma to him from the day that he first saw her, she was an enigma to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... cutlasses, they gathered at a discreet distance from his hook, and squinted through their ferret eyes at this extraordinary man. Elation must have been in his heart, but his face did not reflect it: ever a dark and solitary enigma, he stood aloof from his followers in ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... punishment; but that in the mean time it was very interesting to watch the progress of this startling little drama; and that he himself, instead of merely being the Curate of St Roque's, had become a most captivating enigma, and had made church-going itself half as ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... of mankind is man;" and man remains an enigma for man, if he do not rise to God. So it is that our very nature is a living protest against atheism, and never allows its triumphs to be either general, or of long duration. A solid limit is thus set to our wanderings; ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville |
