Quotes about trick

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed. ”

“The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.”

“I'll be the first to admit that we're the 90's version of Cheap Trick or the Knack but the last to admit that it hasn't been rewarding.”

“People hunger for love, and clowning is a trick to get love close.”

“Why do you sow where the field is eager to destroy the fruit? Where there are medicines of sterility? Where there is murder before birth? You do not even let a harlot remain a harlot, but you make her a murderess as well. Do you see that from drunkenness comes fornication, from fornication adultery, from adultery murder? Indeed, it is something worse than murder and I do not know what to call it; for she does not kill what is formed but prevents its formation. What then? Do you contemn the gift of God, and fight with His laws? What is a curse, do you seek as though it were a blessing? Do you make the anteroom of birth the anteroom of slaughter? Do you teach the woman who is given to you for the procreation of offspring to perpetrate killing? That she may always be beautiful and lovable to her lovers, and that she may rake in more money, she does not refuse to do this, heaping fire on your head; and even if the crime is hers, you are the cause. Hence also arise idolatries. To look pretty many of these women use incantations, libations, philtres, potions, and innumerable other things. Yet after such turpitude, after murder, after idolatry, the matter still seems indifferent to many men–even to many men having wives. In this indifference of the married men there is greater evil filth; for then poisons are prepared, not against the womb of a prostitute, but against your injured wife. Against her are these innumerable tricks, invocations of demons, incantations of the dead, daily wars, ceaseless battles, and unremitting contentions.”

“I remember the time an older man asked me when I was young, "Do you know what you are doing now?" I thought it was some kind of trick question.
Tell me," I said.
You are building your memories," he replied, "so make them good ones.”

“Because you can't argue with all the fools in the world. It's easier to let them have their way, then trick them when they're not paying attention.”

“The world will not end. This is ridiculous. I think it's like 2000. It's a great trick to do business and earn lots of money because stupid people hoard things. This is a stimulator of the economy.”

“We are the pilots of our life, we only know how to manage life. But from time to time, the fog prevents us from performing incredible tricks.”

“When you examine your conscience (attention to what I am going to tell you) do not go too far; look at it as we look at the seashore from the top of the Alps or the Pyrenees, lightly, without going into details. If you do not see anything clearly and certainly wrong, go ahead and be at peace with your God. Mind this, I repeat, and do tell me how you are faring, because the devil could trick you and do you serious hard with his false doctrine and suggestions. This union produces peace of mind; then search for peace. Let nothing disturb you, be it good or bad.”

“Another white man's trick! Let me go! Let me die fighting!”

“What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.”

“Life may contain the "essence" (what else could?); recollection, the repetition in imagination, may decipher the essence and deliver to you the "elixir"; and eventually you may even be privileged to "make" something out of it, "to compound the story." But life itself is neither essence nor elixir, and if you treat as such it will only play its tricks on you.”

“How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick.”

“The trick is to find happiness in the brief gaps between disasters.”

“What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.”

“You know, that might be the answer — to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail.”

“Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.”

“The trick is that as long as you know who you are and what makes you happy, it doesn't matter how others see you.”

“Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal - there's the trick!”

“The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.”

“All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished.”

“There's a monster in our wood. She'll get you if you're not good. Drag you under leaves and sticks. Punish you for all your tricks. Anest of hair and gnawed bone. You are never, ever coming… home.”

“She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there--like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.”

“Listen, Peaches, is what humans are all about," said the voice of Maurice. "They're so keen on tricking one another all the time that they elect governments to do it for them.”

“Life is a trick, and you get one chance to learn it.”

“There are no tricks in plain and simple faith.”

“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”

“Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, "So what." That's one of my favorite things to say. "So what." "My mother didn't love me." So what. "My husband won't ball me." So what. "I'm a success but I'm still alone." So what. I don't know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget.”

“Women are like tricks by sleight of hand,
Which, to admire, we should not understand.”

“Olaf: Of course I'm trying to trick you! That's the way of the world, Baudelaires. Everyone runs around with their secrets and their schemes, trying to outwit everyone else. Ishmael outwitted me, and put me in this cage. But I know how to outwit him and all his islander friends. If you let me out, I can be king of Olaf-Land, and you three can be my new henchfolk.”

“One mistake and you're gone. You just don't make that mistake. With time one's skill increases and one learns hunting tricks. With greater knowledge the dangers diminish. It is wonderful to be free, alone down there.”

“I've been in the public eye for nine years, and I've gone through different phases with it. At first I loved it. Finally, there's a light shining on me and I've wanted that all this time. Then there were a couple of years where I almost became reclusive because it bothered me so much. The trick is to be able to look at it as something that's ethereal and not real. Fame, or whatever that is, isn't tangible. You can't hang your hat on it. You must be able to sit under your covers and giggle about the nonsense of all of it.”

“The hill-cat boasts some cunning of her own,
Some stealthy tricks to better beasts unknown
That quick with prey enough her hunger blunts
And feeds her fat while gaunt the lion hunts.”

“Furthermore, thanks to the Marxist religion, they (the Russians) have everything required to make them patient. They have been promised happiness on earth (a feature which distinguishes Marxism from the Christian religion)— but in the future. The Jew, Mardochee Marx, like the good Jew that he was, was awaiting the coming of the Messiah. He has placed the Messiah conception in a setting of historic materialism by asserting that terrestrial happiness is a factor in an almost endless process of evolution. "Happiness is within your reach," he says, "that I promise you. But you must let evolution take its course and not try to hurry matters." Mankind always falls for a specious trick of that sort… Lenin did not have the time, but Stalin will carry on the good work, and so on and so on… Marxism is a very powerful force. But how shall we assess Christianity, that other child of Judaism, which will not commit itself further than to promise the faithful happiness in another world? Believe me, it is incomparably stronger!”

“If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself?”

“There is a trick with which votaries of Feminism seek to prejudice the public mind against its critics, and that is the “fake” that any man who ventures to criticise the pretensions of Feminism, is actuated by motives of personal rancour against the female sex.”

“I think the trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution because I actually believe in redistribution — at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody's got a shot.”

“Harry Dresden: There was a sound of impact, a raspy, dry scream, and the vampire went down hard. It lay on the ground like a butterfly pinned to a card, arms and legs thrashing uselessly. Its chest and collarbone had been crushed. By an entire frozen turkey. A twenty-pounder. The plucked bird must have fallen from an airplane overhead, doubtlessly manipulated by the curse. By the time it got to the ground, the turkey had already reached its terminal velocity, and was still hard as a brick. The drumsticks poked up above the vampire's crushed chest, their ends wrapped in red tinfoil. The vampire gasped and writhed a little more. The timer popped out of the turkey. Everyone stopped to blink at that for a second. I mean, come on. Impaled by a guided frozen turkey missile. Even by the standards of the quasi-immortal creatures of the night, that ain't something you see twice. "For my next trick," I panted into the startled silence, "anvils."”

“There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practised in the tricks and delusions of oratory.”

“What does opening your eyes and realizing your vulnerability have to do with the knowledge of good and evil? Here's the key: You know you're vulnerable. No other animal knows that. You know what hurts you, because you're vulnerable. And now that you know what hurts you, you can figure out what hurts someone else. And as soon as you know what can hurt someone as, and you can use that, then you have the knowledge of good and evil. Well it's a pretty good trick that the snake pulled because it doesn't seem like the thing that we would have exactly wanted if we knew what the consequence was going to be. As soon as a human being is self conscious and aware of his nakedness, then he has the capacity for evil. That's introduced into the world right at that point.”

“I used to look at homeless peopleand try to imagine what they had once looked like. It's not easy. Beneath the grime and degradation is a face once adored by someone. It's a truth that tricks the eye; our glances slide away. But something happened to ruin that life, to strip it bare; and it was something small, something that but for the grace of God could take us, too.”

“The rude, discursive Thinker is the Scholastic (Schoolman Logician). The true Scholastic is a mystical Subtlist; out of logical Atoms he builds his Universe; he annihilates all living Nature, to put an Artifice of Thoughts (Gedankenkunststuck, literally Conjuror's-trick of Thoughts) in its room. His aim is an infinite Automaton. Opposite to him is the rude, intuitive Poet: this is a mystical Macrologist: he hates rules and fixed form; a wild, violent life reigns instead of it in Nature; all is animate, no law; wilfulness and wonder everywhere. He is merely dynamical. Thus does the Philosophic Spirit arise at first, in altogether separate masses. In the second stage of culture these masses begin to come in contact, multifariously enough; and, as in the union of infinite Extremes, the Finite, the Limited arises, so here also arise "Eclectic Philosophers" without number; the time of misunderstanding begins. The most limited is, in this stage, the most important, the purest Philosopher of the second stage. This class occupies itself wholly with the actual, present world, in the strictest sense. The Philosophers of the first class look down with contempt on those of the second; say, they are a little of everything, and so nothing; hold their views as the results of weakness, as Inconsequentism. On the contrary, the second class, in their turn, pity the first; lay the blame on their visionary enthusiasm, which they say is absurd, even to insanity.”

“In these pages, I continue the struggle to which my whole life is devoted. Describing, I also characterize and evaluate; narrating, I also defend myself, and more often attack. It seems to me that this is the only method of making an autobiography objective in a higher sense, that is, of making it the most adequate expression of personality, conditions, and epoch.
Objectivity is not the pretended indifference with which confirmed hypocrisy, in speaking of friends and enemies, suggests indirectly to the reader what it finds inconvenient to state directly. Objectivity of this sort is nothing but a conventional trick. I do not need it. Since I have submitted to the necessity of writing about myself — nobody has as yet succeeded in writing an autobiography without writing about himself — I can have no reason to hide my sympathies or antipathies, my loves or my hates.”

“Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.”

“She had done the usual trick – been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr Bankes) were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere.”

“They can't be worse than vampires. And you did all right with them."
"Did all right with them? By which I take it you mean we survived?"
"Well..."
"Faeries," Jace went on, as if Simon hadn't spoken, "are the offspring of demons and angels, with the beauty of angels and the viciousness of demons. A vampire might attack you, if you enter its domain, but a faerie could make you dance until you died with your legs ground into stumps, trick you into a midnight swim and drag you screaming underwater until your lungs burst, fill your eyes with faerie dust until you gouged them out at the roots-"
"Jace!”

“The things that always seem to work are the things that any magician can duplicate. Randi's quite right to point that out. But that's not because I'm doing a conjuring trick. You'd think that whatever causes these things to happen doesn't want them to be proved.”

“The net software here did its meltdown trick again at the weekend (it happens about once every six months -- if only everything was as reliable as WordPerfect 4.2, which only chews up a novel about once every two or three years…)”

“Some are tricks of the light
You'll never know
Make a flickering midnight
Light into a glow…”

“Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.”

“Demons are wary of talking and must be forced to speak. When demons are voluntarily chatty it's a trick to distract the exorcist. We must never ask useless questions out of curiosity. We but must interrogate with care. We always begin by asking for the demon's name.”

“The trick is growing up without growing old.”

“Do you know what I think about crying? I think some people have to learn to do it. But once you learn, once you know how to really cry, there's nothing quite like it. I feel sorry for those who don't know the trick. It's like whistling or singing.”

“Anyone can attract a man. The trick is to keep him.”

“Advice,” chuckled Doña Vorchenza. “The years play a sort of alchemical trick, transmuting one’s mutterings to a state of respectability. Give advice at forty and you’re a nag. Give it at seventy and you’re a sage.”

“No,’ Nico said. ‘Getting a second life is one thing. Making it a better life, that’s the trick.’ As soon as he said it, Nico realized he could’ve been talking about himself. He decided not to bring that up.”

“Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. The words made me laugh in delight.”

“Sometimes memory tricks you. Sometimes beauty is best when it's distant.”

“The trick was forgetting about what she had lost… and learning to go on with what she had left.”

“Anyway, how are you and Ramona doing?'

Uh… you know. Pretty good.'

Have you said the L-Word yet?'

The L-Word? You mean? Lesbian?'
Uh… No. The other L-Word.'

?'

Okay. Uh, It's "love." I wasn't trying to trick you or anything.”

“As the water pounded on my back, I reflected that I must be pretty simple. It didn't take much to make me happy. A long night with a dead guy had done the trick.”

“Everybody's crooked. The trick is to find out how they're bent.”

“There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.”

“She has to agree to have me. It could take some time, but I’m confident I can trick her into it.”

“Sometimes doubting is not a lack of faith, but an expression of it. Sometimes to doubt is to merely insist that God be taken seriously not frivolously, to insist that our faith is placed in and upheld by something other than seeming conjuring tricks.”

“The plot is so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer from the middle of the book.”

“Love … It’s a nice little trick if you can find it.

We had found it.

But now I knew finding love and holding on to it were not the same thing.”

“Sanity - a trick of agreement”

“The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.”

“I also remembered that you were beautiful."
"Memory does play tricks on us."
"No. Your face is the same, but I don't remember what beautiful means anymore.”

“Got tight on absinthe last night. Did knife tricks.”

“The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn’t be any of this. Without words, the Führer was nothing. There would be no limping prisoners, no need for consolation or wordly tricks to make us feel better. What good were the words?”

“I'm not a. I have no male pride for you to trick me with, and I am not interested in single combat. That is entirely a weakness of your sex, not mine. I am a woman. I will use any weapon and all weapons to get what I want.”

“He knew that there was a difference between something that makes you happy and something that
doesn’t make you unhappy. The trick was convincing yourself these were one and the same.”

“WORTH IT and perfect are different things. No one’s perfect, yet in romance, everyone becomes WORTH IT. And that’s the trick.”

“Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…”

“I have to spring a cat out of Rumelt Animal Shelter. Think of it as a prison break."

It does the trick. He laughs. "Whose cat?"

"My cat. What do you think? That I break out the cats of strangers?"

"Let me guess, she was framed. She's innocent.”

“The only trick was never giving more that you were willing to lose.”

“They understand not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.”

“No, this trick won't work. The same trick does not work twice. How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?”

“For that matter, Odysseus himself might have borrowed a trick or two from the rabbit hero, for he is very old and was never at a loss for a trick to deceive his enemies.”

“She fell, she hurt, she felt. She lived. And for all the tumble of her experiences, she still had hope. Maybe this next time would do the trick. Or maybe not. But unless you stepped into the game, you would never know.”

“Youth is a circumstance you can't do anything about. The trick is to grow up without getting old.”

“Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.”

“Why didn’t you tell me there was danger? Why didn’t you warn me? Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance of discovering in that way; and you did not help me!”

“Time plays tricks between here and home," said Mogget sepulchrally, frightening the life out of the telephone operator.”

“Calvin is hammering nails into coffee table.
Mom: CALVIN WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THE COFFEE TABLE?!?
Calvin: Is this some sort of trick question, or what?”

“You’re better than this, Adrian. Whatever the reason, you’re better than it. Don’t trick yourself into thinking you’re weaker than you are”

“It's official. Highway patrolmen are not susceptible to the Jedi Mind Trick.”

“Time and distance have a way of playing tricks with your best intentions.”

“You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that's the highest effectiveness man has achieved.”

“They say the secret of success is being at the right place at the right time, but since you never know when the right time is going to be, I figure the trick is to find the right place and just hang around.”

“Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.”

“It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.”

“With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill,” Hall observed. “The trick is to get back down alive.”

“He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!”

“Picture this," said Magnus. "Me with a little monkey friend. I could teach him tricks. I could dress him in a cunning jacket. He could look just like me! But more monkey-shaped.”

“If there's a trick to doing a job you hate… Mrs. Clark says it's to find a job you hate even more.”