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The Idiot vocabulary
2 art terms
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Sphinx
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tags: [art] [mythology]
► definition
Definition:The human-headed, lion-bodied mythological being. Answer its riddle or be eaten.During the Renaissance the statues and carvings of sphinxes were in vogue in Europe.
photo: by Håkan Svensson (Xauxa) - Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1214719
► uses
Uses:
Natasha was lying looking steadily straight before her at one of the mahogany sphinxes carved on the corners of the bedstead, so that the countess only saw her daughter’s face in profile.
Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace
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But besides this there was something else of importance. It was something white by the door—the statue of a sphinx, which also oppressed him.
Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace
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I would fly to see them, with Basin; I would even go to see them among all their sphinxes and brasses, if I knew them, but — I don’t know them!
Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time [volume 1]
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“You are afraid of me, because I talk like a Sphynx.”
“Your language is enigmatical, sir: but though I am bewildered, I am certainly not afraid.”
Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre (1847)
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God, if he believed in one—his conscience, if he had one—were the sole judges to whom he was answerable.
These reflections crossed my mind rapidly, whilst the stranger personage was silent, absorbed, and as if wrapped up in himself. I regarded him with fear mingled with interest, as, doubtless, OEdiphus regarded the Sphinx.
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