"Enigmatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... same writer observes) contains instances of systems, which for successive generations have remained enigmatic. Such he deems the system of Leibnitz, whom another writer (rashly I think, and invidiously) extols as the only philosopher, who was himself deeply convinced of his own doctrines. As hitherto interpreted, however, they have not produced the effect, which Leibnitz himself, in ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Valonne smiled his enigmatic smile. "Yes," he said. "I have once or twice—perhaps you think this room shows traces of some rather violent amusements, and really on looking round, ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... came to him there. It is in a sense a "ghost story," but it is told by an artist and a stylist. "The Residents," moreover, are admirably contrasted, and in some cases deliciously humorously drawn. A charming, enigmatic, "different" book. ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... enigmatic smile, P. Sybarite dexterously tipped up his side of the table and, overturning it, caught the gangster unprepared for any such manoeuvre and pinned him squirming in the angle ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... has said—two great authorities have said in their enigmatic way, that a 'dry light is ever the best.' That may be so in some cases and to some uses, but nothing can be more sure than this, that the light that little Think-well got from his father's head was excellently drenched in his mother's heart. The sweet ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... overland from some port beyond the limits of the Republic? The existence of the treasure confused his thoughts with a peculiar sort of anxiety, as though his life had become bound up with it. It rendered him timorous for a moment before that enigmatic, lighted door. Devil take the fellow! He did not want to see him. There would be nothing to learn from his face, known or unknown. He was a fool to waste his ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... misfortune. Wealth was offered him under conditions that he could not even discuss. Girls threw themselves at his feet, and prayed him in vain to love them. Love-letters were constantly being sent to him, letters which never brought a reply. Some were written in that classical enigmatic style which speaks of "the Rock-Pillow of Meeting," and "waves on the shadow of a face," and "streams that part to reunite." Others were artless and frankly tender, full of the pathos of a ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... which was less offensive than he had feared; but he winced, nevertheless, at the vulgarity of her part so skilfully suggested by paint and powder. She gave him her hand with a frank gesture. "You didn't applaud my scenes to-night," she said, with a smile as enigmatic as the one she used ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... effrontery, effulgence, effusion, egregious, eleemosynary, elicit, elite, elucidate, embellish, embryonic, emendation, emissary, emission, emollient, empiric, empyreal, emulous, encomium, endue, enervate, enfilade, enigmatic, ennui, enunciate, environ, epicure, epigram, episode, epistolary, epitome, equestrian, equilibrium, equinoctial, equity, equivocate, eradicate, erosion, erotic, erudition, eruptive, eschew, esoteric, espousal, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... one needs more the help of his Catholic brother than the immigrant, who has just broken away with a past made up of customs, friendships, racial feelings, of all that is dear to man's heart, and faces an enigmatic future. ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... it arises without any outer stimulus exercised upon the physical organ of sight. On the other hand, it lacks that objective conformity to law characteristic of the after-images which mirror the order of the external world. There is an arbitrary, enigmatic element in dream-pictures, and their logic often seems to run counter to that of waking consciousness. A further characteristic of dream-perception is that we are tied to the level of consciousness prevailing in the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... wash-silk blouse made like a man's shirt, and a green felt hat that obviously belonged to someone else. She was dressed like thousands of English girls, and she looked as though the blood in her might be any in the world but English. Hers was an enigmatic, narrow, high-bred face, crowned by masses of dry black hair, and distinguished from any other face most people had ever seen by the curved line of her little nose and the colourless darkness of her very long, half-closed, ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... Patrick Wethered, suddenly became strangely reticent, and by their very reticence aroused a certain amount of uneasiness in the public mind, until one day the Irish Times published the following extraordinary, enigmatic paragraph: ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... another of his enigmatic smiles: "Oh," he chuckled, "he'll sell, all right! Maybe he's inside. You gents stick out here and watch for him; I'll ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... about him, and perhaps entertained a not too high opinion of Mexican fair play. So, before turning round, he advanced till he was alongside his companion. Then he looked, and saw something which was certainly enigmatic. ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... an enigmatic pipe, whose end was laid before begun, That lengthens, broadens, shrinks ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... to Mr. Fleay that I should mention his solution of the difficulty. Taking the mysterious letters on the last page, "Nella [Greek: ph d ph n r] la B," he says: "La B. is the contraction for La Buffa,[80] one of the characters in the play; and the enigmatic letters, simply substituting the names for the letters themselves, read thus,' Nella fi-delta fi-ni-ro la buffa,' which is good enough Italian for an anagram, meaning 'I will end trifling in fidelity.' But 'Nella fedelita (or fidelita) finiro la ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... indecisive; unsettled, undecided, undetermined; in suspense, open to discussion; controvertible; in question &c. (inquiry) 461. vague; indeterminate, indefinite; ambiguous, equivocal; undefined, undefinable; confused &c. (indistinct) 447; mystic, oracular; dazed. perplexing &c. v.; enigmatic, paradoxical, apocryphal, problematical, hypothetical; experimental &c. 463. unpredictable, unforeseeable (unknowable) 519. fallible, questionable, precarious, slippery, ticklish, debatable, disputable; unreliable, untrustworthy. contingent, contingent on, dependent on; subject to; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... great an error committed by a clever woman. Your ladyship must believe me when I say that the guillotine is the very last place in the world where I would wish to see that enigmatic and elusive personage." ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... end in itself." In his Reminiscences Mr. Conrad has told us, with the surface frankness of a Pole, the genesis of his literary debut of Almayer's Folly, his first novel, and in a quite casual fashion throws fresh light on that somewhat enigmatic character—reminding me in the juxtaposition of his newer psychologic procedure and the simple old tale, of Wagner's Venusberg ballet, scored after he had composed Tristan und Isolde. But, like certain other great Slavic writers, Conrad ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... an enigmatic tone. He could not be sure whether he had succeeded or failed, in her estimation, as a man of the world and ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... which dragged Mr. Peaslee the next morning to the jury-room. The counsel of the night had brought no comfort, and when he came among his fellows their constraint and silence were far from reassuring. Nor, when the sitting had begun, did he like the enigmatic smile with which the well-dressed Paige stood and swung his watch-chain. How he distrusted and feared this smug, self-complacent young man! Yet the state's attorney's first ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... at my throat. It was an artifact—a crumbling ruin, the remnant of an ancient structure whose original appearance I could not fathom. The stone seemed iron-hard. There were traces of inscription on it, but eroded to illegibility. And I never did learn the history of those enigmatic ruins.... They ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... no one spoke. Elizabeth turned the paper this way and that, reading a bit here and a bit there, and gazing spellbound upon the enigmatic pictures. ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... says Lenormant, "not to recognize an echo of fables popular in all Semitic countries about this chasm of Hierapolis, and the part it played in the Deluge, in the enigmatic expressions of the Koran respecting the oven (tannur) which began to bubble and disgorge water all around at the commencement of the Deluge. We know that this tannur has been the occasion of most grotesque imaginings of Mussulman commentators, who had ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... grief. She lifted her thick veil before beginning to speak, and the extreme paleness and unbroken composure of the lady produced a singular impression. This was not an impression of hardness. Interesting femininity was the first thing to be felt in her presence. She was not even enigmatic. It was only clear that the force of a powerful character was at work to master the emotions of her situation. Once or twice as she spoke she touched her eyes with her handkerchief, but her voice was low ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... thought, and made a mental survey of all these people as they stood in respect to myself. Alphonse had progressed, as was visible on his telltale face, from suspicion to something near hostility. Isabella—always a puzzle—was more enigmatic than ever; for she showed herself keenly alive to my faults, and made no concealment of her distrust, though she threw open her house to me with a persistent and almost anxious hospitality. Here was no friend. Had I, in Isabella, an enemy? Of Devar, all that ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... always...." he said, and with that enigmatic remark the conversation lapsed, for Warmson had returned. But later, when the saddle of mutton had been succeeded by sweet, savoury, and dessert, and Val had received a cheque for twenty pounds and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... hurrah from land—at one time from a troop of children, at another from grown-up people, but mostly from wondering peasants who gaze long at the strange-looking ship and muse over its enigmatic destination. And men and women on board sloops and ten-oared boats stand up in their red shirts that glow in the sunlight, and rest on their oars to look at us. Steamboats crowded with people came out from the towns we ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... Shatrenschar;—though India may almost claim it, on account of the greater perfection to which it has brought the game, and the lead it has always taken in chess-culture. India rejoices in a flourishing chess-school. The Indian Problem is known as the perfection of Enigmatic Chess. And if Paul Morphy had gone to Calcutta, instead of London and Paris, he would have found there one Mohesh Ghutuck, who, without discovering that he was a P. and move behind his best play, and without becoming too sick to proceed with the match, would have given ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... there were elements that gratified low egoism, tickled gossiping curiosity, and fascinated timorous superstition. His need of personal predominance, his labyrinthine allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures, his enigmatic visions, and his false certitude about the Divine intentions, never ceased, in his own large soul, to be ennobled by that fervid piety, that passionate sense of the infinite, that active sympathy, ...
— Romola • George Eliot |
