Sphinx quotes:

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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
It's like the riddle of the Sphinx... why are there so many great unmarried women, and no great unmarried men? -- Sarah Jessica Parker
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
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
It is of first-class importance that our answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx should be in step with how we conduct our civilisation, and this should in turn be in step with the actual workings of living systems. -- Gregory Bateson
She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret. -- Oscar Wilde
Sphinxes without secrets. -- Oscar Wilde
You can't escape the puking sphinx. -- Frank Zappa
She moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx. -- Laini Taylor
From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
what sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination -- Allen Ginsberg
This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home. -- Agnes Repplier
Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise. -- Charles Baudelaire
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
The pyramid once passed there was still a short way to go before we confronted the Sphinx, in the middle of what our contemporaries have left him of his desert. -- Pierre Loti
When the Amherst sphinx styled herself a pagan, she meant she didn't believe in the biblical God. What sort of deity, if any, she did believe in is hard to pinpoint. -- Gary Sloan
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
When we find something new at Giza, we announce it to the world. The Sphinx and the Pyramids are world treasures. We are the guardian's of these treasures, but they belong to the world. -- Zahi Hawass
The population question is the real riddle of the sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication, all other riddle sink into insignificance. -- Thomas Huxley
Are there any mythical beasts which aren't simple pastiches of nature? Centaurs, minotaurs, unicorns, griffons, chimeras, sphinxes, manticores, and the like don't speak well for the human imagination. None is as novel as a kangaroo or starfish. -- William Poundstone
What is the little one thinking about? Very wonderful things, no doubt; Unwritten history! Unfathomed mystery! Yet he laughs and cries, and eats and drinks, And chuckles and crows, and nods and winks, As if his head were as full of kinks And curious riddles as any sphinx! -- J. G. Holland
I have found a shaft, going 29 meters [95 feet, approximately] vertically down into the ground, exactly halfway between the Chefren Pyramid and the Sphinx. At the bottom, which was filled with water, we have found a burial chamber with four pillars. In the middle is a large granite sarcophagus which I expect to be the grave of Osiris, the god, -- Zahi Hawass
But Shakespeare knows what the sphinx thinks, if anybody does. His genius is penetrative as cold midwinter entering every room, and making warmth shiver in ague fits. I think Shakespeare never errs in his logical sequence in character. He surprises us, seems unnatural to us, but because we have been superficial observers; while genius will disclose those truths to which we are blind. -- William Alfred Quayle
The Sphinx-riddle. Solve it, or be torn to bits, is the decree. -- D. H. Lawrence
Can't you nudge her into submission? (Taryn) Are you kidding? As stubborn as she is? I'd fry my brain trying. (Sphinx) -- Sherrilyn Kenyon
My ex-girlfriend was very sexy. She reminded me of the Sphinx because she was very mysterious and eternal and solid...and her nose was shot off by French soldiers. -- Emo Philips
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
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
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
The sphinx will always have to be looked after. -- Zahi Hawass
A beautiful woman can be painted as a totem only; not as a woman, but as a Madonna, a queen, a sphinx. -- Saul Steinberg
You are afraid of me, because I talk like a sphinx. -- Charlotte Bronte
Pity for him who one day looks uponhis inward sphinx and questions it. He is lost. -- Ruben Dario
Every period of time is a sphinx that throws itself into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved. -- Heinrich Heine
Creamy and leggy, with long azure hair and the eyes of a silent-movie star, she moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx. -- Laini Taylor
Older recordings just seemed to take me somewhere into my own pre-history. That's always been an interesting, sort of sphinx-like territory for me to wander around in. -- Guy Maddin
I never saw a pyramid, but I've seen photographs; I know what a pyramid or a sphinx looks like. There are pictures that do that, but they satisfy a different kind of interest. -- Garry Winogrand

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