The Sphinx Quotes & Sayings

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

What's this?' she asked. 'Is it a sphinx?'
Yes,' he answered, 'and the sphinx is you. — Ivan Turgenev

One time I told her that she reminded me of that charming tale, the one with the red shoes."
Helen had always hated that story, in which a little girl who had dared to wear red shoes to her confirmation had been doomed to dance in them until she died. "You're referring to the one by Hans Christian Andersen? It's a morality tale about the wages of sin, is it not?"
His smile faded, and his gaze returned to hers, now appraising rather than dismissive. "I confess, I don't recall the moral of the story."
"No doubt it's been a long time since you've read it." Helen made her face into the inscrutable mask that had always annoyed the twins and provoked them to call her a sphinx. "The red shoes become instruments of death, after a girl yields to temptation. — Lisa Kleypas

You have always been dazzling - the life of every party, the glamour girl who dances until dawn."
"Well, I am. But I'm dancing on broken glass. I'm Miss Havisham's wedding cake, Kit. A frothy, expensive, mice-eaten confection. I'm the Sphinx's nose, the fallen Colossus. I'm a beautiful ruin, and it's time that has done the deed. — Deanna Raybourn

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

Also a fan of being inscrutable, Franco once said, 'You are a the slave of what you say and the master of what you don't say.' He might have added that that approach isn't always guaranteed to work. If you attempt, for example, to be sphinx-like, mysterious and enigmatic when you get to the front of a long queue at the chip shop, you do risk being punched quite hard in the back of the head. — Alexei Sayle

Even the tail of the Sphinx is wrapped around its right hind paw signaling thereby the Earth's direction of rotation as we see with Menkaure's spatial lag (i.e., longitudinal and hence related to the Sunrise) in reference to the other two pyramids. With all other clues popping up in my research, this adds up to the evidence that there were a certain type of knowledge which the later generations of the ancient Egyptians were not aware of even though the structures and monuments of Egypt testified for its presence as we especially observe on the Sphinx. This is an unequivocal manifestation of the loss of that knowledge as a consequence of rebellion and revolution instead of uninterrupted inheritance and authentic tradition. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

His face bore an imperial nose, one belonging to the same pedigree as the one venomously blasted from the face of the Sphinx statue by Greek envy. — David B. Dacosta

Nobody knows the age of the Sphinx. There are those who claim that it is far older than the four thousand years attributed to it by conventional thinking. They have interesting reasons. First, it has been weathered, according to geologists, by the action of water, not wind. This fact is revealed by the condition of its sandstone body. According to John Anthony West, it must have been built long before the time of the pharaohs because it shows evidence of water erosion. Dr. Robert Schoch, a Boston University geologist, has confirmed the validity of this theory, and his dating was endorsed by three hundred other geologists at the 1992 convention of the Geological Society of America. — Whitley Strieber

Of Dixie Doyle it is said that she could convince grown men of anything. While she is only a mediocre student and a wholly untalented tennis player, she possesses a quality of performed girlishness that turns sex into a ragged paradox for men beyond the age of thirty. She speaks with the hint of a babyish lisp, the pink end of her tongue frequently peeking out from between her teeth, but her eyes are implacable fields of gray that at any moment could conceal everything you imagine - or nothing at all. She might be an X-ray registering the skeleton of your soul, or, like Oscar Wilde's women, she might be a sphinx without a secret. — Joshua Gaylord

Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the mystery and tears of things so that the commonest object, the most familiar face- even my own- become ghostly, unreal, enigmatic. I get into an attitude of almost total scepticism, nescience, solipsism, in a world of dumb, sphinx-like things that cannot explain themselves. The discovery of how I am situated- a sentient being on a globe in space overshadows me. I wish I were just nothing. — W.N.P. Barbellion

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building.
And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful city extending as far as the eyes could see, so now I went to the roof of that last and most magnificent of towers.
Then I understood. Everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city. Its Pandora's box.
Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here, and seen with dismay what he had never suspected. That the city was not the endless sucession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits, fading out into the country on all sides into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless.
And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining ediface that he had reared in his mind came crashing down.
That was the gift of Alfred Smith to the citizens of New York. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The Sphinx extended a hand. Seth shook it. "One last thing, Seth. Are you aware that Midsummer Eve is scarcely a week away?" "Yeah." "Might I make a suggestion?" "Okay." "Don't open any windows. — Brandon Mull

His copy was full of lofty echoes: Greek Tragedy; Damocle's sword; manna from heaven; the myth of Sisyphus; the last of the Mohicans; hydra-headed and Circe-voiced; experiments with truth; discovery of India; biblical resonance; the lessons of Vedanta; the centre does not hold; the road not taken; the mimic men; for whom the bell tolls; a hundred visions and revisions; the power and the glory; the heart of the matter; the heart of darkness; the agony and the ecstasy; sands of time; riddle of the Sphinx; test of tantalus; murmurs of mortality; Falstaffian figure; Dickensian darkness; ... — Tarun J. Tejpal

The sphinx is the riddle, not the riddler. Do you knows what that means?
No. Is it a riddle? — George R R Martin

The myth persists in Egypt to this day that Napoleon's soldiers actually disfigured some of these ruins, and are even said to have used the Sphinx as target practice for their cannons, shooting off its nose. This last is a calumny: it is known that the Sphinx was defaced as early as the eighth century by the Sufi iconoclast Saim-ed-Dahr,28 and was further damaged in 1380 by fanatical Muslims prompted by the Koran's strictures against images. During these early times the Sphinx was not regarded as a precious historical object, but instead inspired fear: through the centuries it became known to the Egyptians as Abul-Hol (Father of Terrors), and would only begin to be regarded more favorably when it became a tourist attraction in the later nineteenth century. — Paul Strathern

Percy: "You asked Poseidon for ... me?"
Tyson: "For a friend, young cyclopes grow up alone on the streets, learns to make things out of scraps. Learn to survive."
Percy: "But that's so cruel!"
Tyson: "Makes us appreciate blessings, not be greedy and mean and fat like Polyphemus. But I got scared. Monsters chased me so much, clawed me sometimes
"
Percy: "The scars on your back?"
Tyson: "Sphinx on Seventy-second Street. Big Bully. I prayed to Daddy for help. Soon the people at Meriwether found me. Mey you. Biggest blessing ever. Sorry I said Poseidon was mean. He sent me a brother. — Rick Riordan

The Sphinx-riddle. Solve it, or be torn to bits, is the decree. — D.H. Lawrence

He spoke of dreams and never named the dreamer, of a glass candle that could not be lit and eggs that would not hatch. He said the sphinx was the riddle, not the riddler, whatever that meant. — George R R Martin

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

Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never be an answer to the sphinx's riddle. — William James

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

Merle had the feeling that he almost kissed her, but then his lips only touched her hair briefly, and all she could think of was that she hadn't washed it for days. It was crazy, really. Here they were, all trapped in this accursed sphinx stronghold, and she was thinking about washing her hair! Was that what being in love did to you? And then, was it being in love that was responsible for the lump in her throat and the fluttering in her stomach? — Kai Meyer

Seth had promised the demon he would heal him. Graulas had no other hope for aid. He might have lived an evil life, but the demon had helped Seth multiple times. Seth fingered the Translocator. Could this be a bad move? What if Graulas turned on him? Of course, even in his weakened state, the demon could have killed Seth upon any of his previous visits. If Seth healed him, Graulas would probably be more grateful than ever. Maybe the cunning demon could suggest strategies to stop the Sphinx, or provide insight about Nagi Luna. After a dusting from the Sands of Sanctity, the demon would still be old and dying, but curing the disease would reduce the pain and maybe buy Graulas a little extra time. And Seth would keep the Translocator handy. If all else failed, he could always teleport away. Seth — Brandon Mull

Monster" is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, "divine portent," itself formed on the root of the verb monere, "to warn." It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, "Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening. — Susan Stryker

And the Sphinx broke its long silence:
Don't expect too much. — Carl Sandburg

Sphinx is the riddle, not the riddler. — George R R Martin

You sit at the edge of the world,
I am in a crater that's no more.
Words without letters
Standing in the shadow of the door.
The moon shines down on a sleeping lizard,
Little fish rain from the sky.
Outside the window there are soldiers,
steeling themselves to die.
(Refrain)
Kafka sits in a chair by the shore,
Thinking for the pendulum that moves the world, it seems.
When your heart is closed,
The shadow of the unmoving Sphinx,
Becomes a knife that pierces your dreams.
The drowning girl's fingers
Search for the entrance stone, and more.
Lifting the hem of her azure dress,
She gazes
at Kafka on the shore — Haruki Murakami

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

Experience has taught me a technique for dealing with such people [ ... ] I counter the devotees of the Great Pyramid by adoration of the Sphinx; and the devotee of nuts by pointing out that hazelnuts and walnuts are as deleterious as other foods and only Brazil nuts should be tolerated. But when I was younger I had not yet acquired this technique, with the result that my contacts with cranks were sometimes alarming. — Bertrand Russell

Every human face is more enigmatic than the timeworn expression on the famous Sphinx out there in the sands of Egypt. — Dean Koontz

It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon. — H.P. Lovecraft

She was not daily bread. She was stardust. Her solitude made her and was part of her. Taken from her distant sky, she must have become a creature as different as fallen meteor from pulsing star. One may ask of the Sphinx if life would not have been dearer to her, lived as other women lived it? To have been, in essence, more as other women were? Or if, in so doing and so being, she would have missed that inordinate compulsion, that inquisitive comprehension that made her Emily Dickinson? It is to ask again the old riddle of genius against everyday happiness. — Martha Dickinson Bianchi

The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

According to Thomas, the city [of Bath] had once been a veritable hotbed of manifestations, with every sorcerer, bunyip, golem, goblin, pict, pixie, demon, thylacine, gorgon, moron, cult, scum, mummy, rummy, groke, sphinx, minx, muse, flagellant, diva, reaver, weaver, reaper, scabbarder, scabmettler, dwarf, midget, little person, leprechaun, marshwiggle, totem, soothsayer, truthsayer, hatter, hattifattener, imp, panwere, mothman, shaman, flukeman, warlock, morlock, poltergeist, zeitgeist, elemental, banshee, manshee, lycanthrope, lichenthrope, sprite, wight, aufwader, harpy, silkie, kelpie, klepto, specter, mutant, cyborg, balrog, troll, ogre, cat in shoes, dog in a hat, psychic and psychotic seemingly having decided that this was the hot spot to visit. — Daniel O'Malley

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

You can't escape the puking sphinx. — Frank Zappa

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jail-house and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! — Allen Ginsberg

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 BEAUTY
Poetry is beautiful, in my eyes.
Its words are aged with wisdom.
A poets tears burn words, to vanish sighs,
As eternal as silence is sincere.
A sphinx pressed against the sky,
Is as pure as an angel's virginity.
The words of a poet articulates sound
Nor tears, nor laughter prohibits meaning.
Poets who speak wisely with conceit,
Interpret words beyond reason.
To consume the hour with extensive study;
Is admired for its esthetic beauty.
Poetry, the mirror image of perfection:
Meaningful text, burn words internally!
- Angela Khristin Brown — Angela Khristin Brown

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

I know of nothing that has led me to reflect more on Plato's concealment and sphinx nature than that happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was discovered no 'Bible', nothing Egyptian, Pythagorean, Platonic - but Aristophanes. How could even a Plato have endured life - a Greek life which he had denied - without an Aristophanes! - — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Yea, she hath passed hereby, and blessed the sheaves,
And the great garths, and stacks, and quiet farms,
And all the tawny, and the crimson leaves.
Yea, she hath passed with poppies in her arms,
Under the star of dusk, through stealing mist,
And blessed the earth, and gone, while no man wist.
With slow, reluctant feet, and weary eyes,
And eye-lids heavy with the coming sleep,
With small breasts lifted up in stress of sighs,
She passed, as shadows pass, among the sheep;
While the earth dreamed, and only I was ware
Of that faint fragrance blown from her soft hair.
The land lay steeped in peace of silent dreams;
There was no sound amid the sacred boughs.
Nor any mournful music in her streams:
Only I saw the shadow on her brows,
Only I knew her for the yearly slain,
And wept, and weep until she come again. — Frederic Manning

There is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato's secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no 'Bible,' nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic - but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life - a Greek life which he repudiated - without an Aristophanes! — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

There's a very loud noise in my ear, not unlike a cat sneezing, if the cat is the size of the Great Sphinx of Giza and it's just inhaled three tons of snuff. — Charles Stross

We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal high road of respectability and duty, and then complain of those ways being so intricate and so dark. We stand bewildered before the mystery of our own making, and the riddles of life that we will not solve, and then accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us. — H. P. Blavatsky

First think of the person who lives in disguise,
Who deals in secrets and tells naught but lies.
Next, tell me what's always the last thing to mend,
The middle of middle and the end of end?
And finally give me the sound often heard
During the search for a hard-to-find word.
Now string them together, and answer me this,
Which creature would you be unwilling to kiss? — J.K. Rowling

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

Just last week, gunmen on a motorcycle shot and killed two tourism police officers near the gate of the complex that contains the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx, across the Nile from Cairo and about 400 miles north of Luxor. — Anonymous

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

You have to be used to the twists of fate and being caught up in them to dare lift your eyes when certain questions appear in all their horrible starkness. Good or evil are behind the stern question mark. What are you going to do? asks the Sphinx.
The habit of undergoing trials by fire is one Jean Valjean had acquired. He looked the sphinx full in the face. He examined the merciless problem from every angle. — Victor Hugo

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

Yours...'til the Sphinx winks. — M. Allen

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

There are many kinds of eyes. Even the sphinx has eyes - and consequently there are many kinds of 'truths,' and consequently there is no truth — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

The sphinx will always have to be looked after. — Zahi Hawass

Yes, an actual full-sized camel. If you find that confusing, just think how the criosphinx must have felt.
Where did the camel come from, you ask? I may have mentioned Walt's collection of amulets. Two of them summoned disgusting camels. I'd
met them before, so I was less than excited when a ton of dromedary flesh flew across my line of sight, plowed into the sphinx, and collapsed on top
of it. The sphinx growled in outrage as it tried to free itself. The camel grunted and farted.
"Hindenburg," I said. Only one camel could possibly fart that badly. "Walt, why in the world - ?"
"Sorry!" he yelled. "Wrong amulet!"
The technique worked, at any rate. The camel wasn't much of a fighter, but it was quite heavy and clumsy. The criosphinx snarled and clawed
at the floor, trying unsuccessfully to push the camel off; but Hindenburg just splayed his legs, made alarmed honking sounds, and let loose gas.
I moved to Walt's side and tried to get my bearings. — Rick Riordan

The worst stage was when one could tell she was still awake and almost alert, but she knew that nothing worked. Imprisoned. She was imprisoned. In a statue like the Sphinx. Looking out from the eyes. Her own mind, at that point, was as small and bewildered as a little fly. Behind great battlements. — M T Anderson

Her nerves extended into those tresses, and her temper could always be softened by stroking them down. When her hair was brushed she would instantly sink into stillness and look like the Sphinx. If, in passing under one of the Edgon banks, any of its thick skeins were caught, as they sometimes were, by a prickly tuft of the large Ulex Europaeus
which will act as a sort of hairbrush
she would go back a few steps, and pass against it a second time. — Thomas Hardy

Mathematics, as far as he was concerned, was a Sphinx charged with deceitful puzzles whose cold malicious gaze transfixed her victims, and he gave the monster a wide berth. — Hermann Hesse

Courage~ What makes the flag on the mast to wave? What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage! What makes the sphinx the seventh wonder? Courage! What makes the dawn come up like thunder? Courage! What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the "ape" in apricot?~Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz — L. Frank Baum

The truly perfect pangram would contain all the letters of the alphabet in the right order, but the only thing that achieves that is the alphabet. There are phrases that use fewer characters, but they are not as catchy. And this is not for want of trying. Here are two of the shortest: 'Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim.' 'Sphinx of black quartz judge my vow. — Simon Garfield

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

When I was girl by Nilus stream
I watched the deserts stars arise;
My lover, he who dreamed the Sphinx,
Learned all his dreaming from eyes.
I bore in Greece a burning name,
And I have been in Italy
Madonna to a painter-lad,
And mistress to a Medici.
And have you heard (and I have heard)
Of puzzled men with decorous mien,
Who judged - the wench knew far too much -
And burnt her on the Salem green? — Adelaide Crapsey

It's just a bunch of dumb, random facts," Annabeth insisted. "Riddles are supposed to make you think." "Think?" The Sphinx frowned. "How am I supposed to test whether you can think? That's ridiculous! Now, how much force is required - — Rick Riordan

Las Vegas has become a child's picture-book dream of a city-here a storybook castle, there a sphinx-flanked black pyramid beaming white light into the darkness as a landing beam for UFOs, and everywhere neon oracles and twisting screens predict happiness and good fortune, announce singers and comedians and magicians in residence or on their way, and the lights always flash and beckon and call. Once every hour a volcano erupts in light and flame. Once every hour a pirate ship sinks a man o'war. — Neil Gaiman

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

The critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed by one whose feet are wounded and who knows not his name. Rather, he will look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province to intensify, and whose majesty his privilege to make more marvellous in the eyes of men. — Oscar Wilde

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

In the beginning, Orion was not considered to be a hunter but as the heretic cult grew, its adherent dared to war the upper heavens and were set off on a quest for hunting the lion (i.e., Sphinx) in its own dwelling. This is literally what 'Orion' the word means, the 'dwelling of the lion'. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

Sphinx Resurrected by Christine Murphy gives a new romantic twist to the realm of the paranormal. The world building is extraordinary and pulls you in to the powerful domain of the Sphinx Warriors and won't let you go. — Marti Ziegler

The Sphinx is missing a nose. Someone shot it off in a moment of idle desecration - some say it was Mameluke Turks, others, Napoleonic soldiers. — Carl Sagan

At your young age, you stand up for Truth and use your conscience to see that justice always prevails, even if it leads to grueling consequences or personal sacrifices. You never fail to use your heart. Again, your heart is your key to immortality. Keep a good heart and all that is anything and everything will remember you," said the Sphinx. — Suzy Kassem

Karou was, simply, lovely. 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. Beyond merely pretty, her face was vibrantly alive, her gaze always sparking and luminous, and she had a birdlike way of cocking her head, her lips pressed together while her dark eyes danced, that hinted at secrets and mysteries. — Laini Taylor

The Cat
The cat licks its paw and lies down in the bookshelf nook. She can lie in a sphinx position without moving for so many hours and then turn her head to me and rise and stretch and turn her back to me and lick her paw again as if no time had passed. It hasn't and she is the sphinx with all the time in the world in the desert of her time the cat knows where flies die wees ghosts in the motes of air and shadows in sunbeams. She hears the music of the spheres and the hum in the wires of houses and the hum of the universe in interstellar spaces but prefers domestic places and the hum of the heater. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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

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

Virginia," Billy said urgently. "Don't do this."
"Shut up,Billy."
"Think of the people in San Francisco."
"I don't know any of the people in San Francisco," Virginia answered, then paused. "Well,actually I do,and I don't like them. But I do like you,Billy, and I'm not going to allow you to end up as lunch for some raggedy lion-monster-thingy."
"A sphinx," Machiavelli corrected her. He was standing at the bars again. "Mistress Dare," the Italian said carefully. "I absolutely applaud you for what you want to do for your friend. But I urge you to think of the bigger picture. — Michael Scott

We want to get behind the beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that reflects to us our own desire for good. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a sorrowfully irritating mystery. We want to feed on it, but it is only an object we can look on; it appears to us from a certain distance. The great sorrow of human life is knowing that to look and to eat are two different operations. Only on the other side of heaven, where God lives, are they one and the same operation. Children already experience this sorrow when they look at a cake for a long time and nearly regret eating it, but are powerless to help themselves. Maybe the vices, depravities and crimes are nearly always or even always in their essence attempts to eat beauty, to eat what one can only look at. Eve initiated this. If she lost our humanity by eating a fruit, the reverse attitude - looking at a fruit without eating it - must be what saves. — Simone Weil

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

Fusing the flying bird with the Sun disk in different civilizations probably represented accepting both of the roles of the parallel and the perpendicular celestial mechanics; the seconds and the minutes marks. But considering the animal and/or the mythical winged creature (Kheper, Bird, Sphinx ..etc) to be the Sun or to play its role, was definitely a heresy. Therefore, the Winged Sun resembled the cross-correlation between the parallel and the perpendicular; but if it had been assigned to anything else other than the mythical creature, then that was another layer of heresy. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

Polo: "You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours."
Khan: "Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx. — Italo Calvino

In the final analysis, what is it that we call popular, democratic power? Beyond the expressed will of the people, as it is supposedly formulated, there is no appeal; here we meet the absolute, the universal, the indivisible, and the immovable. There is nothing a priori, nothing anterior to democratic power; no ideas of truth, no notions of good or bad, can bind the Popular Will. This 'will' is free in the sense that it stands above all notions of value. It is egalitarian because it is reared on arithmetic equality..It is not open to any appeal, it listens to no demand for grace, no plea for compassion. Like the Sphinx, the Popular Will is immovable in its enigmatic silence. — Tage Lindbom

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

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

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

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

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

A sphinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined. Unknowable. Indefinable. Those were all the words Brandy used to describe me in my veils. Not just a story that goes and then, and then, and then, and then until you die. — Chuck Palahniuk