Quotes About Riddles

It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence.

Life is essentially a series of events to be lived through rather than intellectual riddles to be played with and solved.

Serving men cleared away the swan, hardly touched. Cersei beckoned for the sweets. "I hope you like blackberry tarts." "I love all sorts of tarts." "Oh, I've know that for a long while. Do you know why Varys is so dangerous?" "Are we playing riddles now? No." "He doesn't have a cock." "Neither do you." And don't you just hate that, Cersei? ""Perhaps, I'm dangerous too. You, on the other hand, are as big a fool as every other man. That worm between your legs does half your thinking.

There is an Anglo-Saxon form of riddling that plays with the polarities of words like bright and dark, cold and warm, throwing them against one another and crafting lines of rich, humorous nonsense like this poem that has been around for so many hundreds of years that you just have to sit back and, with nothing else in mind, laugh out loud. 

Like such eclectic predecessors as Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree, Jr., Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, China Miéville, and Kazuo Ishiguro, Chiang has explored conventional tropes of science fiction in highly unconventional ways . . . Likely to linger in the memory the way riddles may linger—teasing, tormenting, illuminating, thrilling.' Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker

I would not have Drool reading Cicero or crafting clever riddles, but under my tutelage he had become more than fair at tumbling and juggling, could belch a song, and was, at court, at least as entertaining as a trained bear, with slightly less proclivity for eating the guests. With guidance, he would make a proper fool.

That's your evidence? Flimsy. Maybe he secretly fights crime and he's texting infuriating riddles to his nemesis," suggested Karou. "Yes, I'm sure that's it. Thank you.

The blood of Heaven binds you," said the Queen. "Blood calls to blood, under the skin. But love and blood are not the same." "Riddles," Clary said angrily. "Do you even mean anything when you talk like that?" "He is bound to you," said the Queen. "But does he love you?

The wise man, the dragon rumbled, does not play games with dragons.

But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate tendency to make one belligerent.

Pain helps the body grow.Riddles help the mind grow.Loss helps the heart grow.Temptations help the soul grow.

Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.

What do you think death is, man? Of whom do we speak when we speak of a man who was and is not? Are these blind riddles or are they not some part of every man's jurisdiction? What is death if not an agency? And whom does he intend toward?

Many of the prophecy-riddles reflect Leonardo's love for animals. "Countless numbers will have their little children taken away and their throats shall be cut," is one prophecy, as if describing a brutal act of war and genocide. But then Leonardo, who had become a vegetarian, reveals that this prophecy refers to the sheep and cows that humans eat.

The way sadness works is one of the strangest riddles of the world.

The way sadness works is one of the strange riddles of the world.

It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers.

The irony here is exquisite - an endangered bird helping to spread a major weed. It's aa challenging example of the riddles of the 'new nature'.

I love mysteries - just in an old school way.

Describe us as a sex, was her challenge. Sphinxes without secrets.

We have withdrawn into ourselves not out of horror, but out of a need to reconstruct the patterns we have called truth. In the very fabric of the realm, its settlement, history, tales, war, poetry, its riddles - if there is an answer there, a shape of truth that holds itself, we will find it.

Philosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

Why, sir, what's all this? Surely you have not forgot you are entertaining the Captain?' 'And how am I supposed to entertain the Captain, for all love?' asked Stephen. 'Am I to grin at him through a horse-collar, propose riddles and conundrums, cut capers?' 'Come, sir,' said Calamy, 'the gunroom is entertaining the Captain to dinner, and you have only ten minutes to change. There is not a moment to be lost.

Human knowledge, by its nature, has limits, so some questions must remain mysteries. Some religions treat such mysteries as secrets that the gods choose to hide from humans; others, such as Buddhism, treat them as ultimate riddles that are not worth pursuing.