Sphinx Quotes

• There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Eye, Results, Various

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• Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Wise, Attitude, Cat

  Charles Baudelaire, “Les Chats (Cats)”

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• She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.

  Oscar Wilde

  Passion, Secret, Secrecy

  Oscar Wilde (2014). “The Complete Short Stories: The Model Millionaire + The Canterville Ghost + The Happy Prince + The Star-Child + The Fisherman And His Soul + The Selfish Giant + The Nightingale And The Rose + The Sphinx Without A Secret + many more...”, p.203, e-artnow

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• She moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.

  Laini Taylor

  Azure, Moved

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• Drowsing, they take the noble attitude of a great sphinx, who, in a desert land, sleeps always, dreaming dreams that have no end.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Dream, Attitude, Sleep

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• It's like the riddle of the Sphinx... why are there so many great unmarried women, and no great unmarried men?

  Sarah Jessica Parker

  Men, Riddle, Unmarried

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• The Sphinx-riddle. Solve it, or be torn to bits, is the decree.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Marriage, Decree, Torn

  D. H. Lawrence, Michael Herbert (1988). “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays”, p.216, Cambridge University Press

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• For I am I: ergo, the truth of myself; my own sphinx, conflict, chaos, vortex—asymmetric to all rhythms, oblique to all paths. I am the prism between black and white: mine own unison in duality.

  Austin Osman Spare

  Black And White, Path, Vortex

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• In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Dream, Writing, Thinking

  Jorge Luis Borges (1964). “Dreamtigers”, p.48, University of Texas Press

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• Sphinxes without secrets.

  Oscar Wilde

  Women, Secret

  Oscar Wilde (2012). “A Woman of No Importance (with audio): Enhanced Edition with Full Cast Audio Performance”, p.24, L.A. Theatre Works

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• From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Lonely, Rose, Empires

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2009). “The Crack-Up”, p.32, New Directions Publishing

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• You can't escape the puking sphinx.

  Frank Zappa

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• I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Laughter, Hate, Heart

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• You are afraid of me, because I talk like a sphinx.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Charlotte Bronte (2013). “Jane Eyre”, p.177, Simon and Schuster

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• This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home.

  Agnes Repplier

  Home, Heart, House

  Agnes Repplier (1893). “Essays in Idleness”

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• The problem of Eternity, of which the face of the Sphinx speaks, takes us into the realm of the impossible. Even the problem of Time is simple in comparison with the problem of Eternity.

  P.D. Ouspensky

  Simple, Faces, Impossible

  "A New Model of the Universe: Principles of the Psychological Method in Its Application to Problems of Science, Religion and Art". Book by P.D. Ouspensky, 1931.

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• A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of laughter more terrible than any sadness-a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.

  Jack London

  Dog, Laughter, Sadness

  Jack London (1992). “The Call of the Wild and White Fang”, p.71, Wordsworth Editions

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• On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw
  A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,
  A Buddha, hand at rest,
  Hand lifted up that blest;
  And right between these two a girl at play
  That, it may be, had danced her life away.

  William Butler Yeats

  Girl, Rocks, Hands

  William Butler Yeats (2008). “COLLECTED POEMS OF W.B. YEATS”, p.446, Simon and Schuster

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• Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.

  Gustave Le Bon

  People, Psychology, Crowds

  Gustave Le Bon (2012). “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind”, p.70, Courier Corporation

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• Pity for him who one day looks uponhis inward sphinx and questions it. He is lost.

  Ruben Dario

  One Day, Inward, Looks

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• It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.

  Gregory Bateson

  Years, Fifty, Riddle

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• If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Running, War, Eye

  Henry David Thoreau (2004). “Walden: 150th Anniversary Illustrated Edition of the American Classic”, p.313, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• A major difficulty is that the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx is partly a product of the answers that we already have given to the riddle in its various forms.

  Gregory Bateson

  Answers, Form, Given

  Gregory Bateson, Mary Catherine Bateson (1987). “Angels fear: towards an epistemology of the sacred”, MacMillan Publishing Company

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• Every period of time is a sphinx that throws itself into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved.

  Heinrich Heine

  Periods, Riddle, Abyss

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• The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Stars, Fall, Past

  W.E.B. Du Bois, Vann R. Newkirk II (2017). “The Souls of Black Folk”, p.34, Restless Books

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