Trickery Quotes - Page 2

• I do not pray. . . . I do not expect God to single me out and grant me advantages over my fellow men. . . . Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Prayer, Responsibility, Men

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• Writing for me always requires trickery. Tricking myself into sitting down, letting words tumble out until you find the good ones. It's sort of a trance. And when a piece is done, I have little memory of how I wrote it, and zero confidence I'd ever be able to do it again.

  John Hodgman

  Zero, Memories, Writing

  "John Hodgman Discusses 'More Information Than You Require'". Online chat, www.washingtonpost.com. October 29, 2008.

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• Denied the outlet, through play, of his energies, he recoiled upon himself and developed his mental processes. He became cunning; he had idle time in which to devote himself to thoughts of trickery.

  Jack London

  Play, Energy, Process

  Jack London (2015). “White Fang (Arcadia Classics)”, p.90, Jack London

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• So-called Individualism is the social and economic laissez-faire: the exploitation of the masses by the classes by means of legal trickery, spiritual debasement and systematic indoctrination of the servile spirit, which process is known as 'education'.

  Emma Goldman

  Spiritual, Mean, Class

  Emma Goldman (1998). “Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader”

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• Trickery succeeds sometimes, but it always commits suicide.

  Khalil Gibran

  Suicide, Wisdom, Fun

  Khalil Gibran “The New Frontier and Sand and Foam”, Library of Alexandria

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• It is human nature to want to believe in the wizardry of the magician--but also to turn against him and to scorn him the moment that he commits the slightest error that reveals his trickery. Those in the audience are embarrassed to have been so easily astonished, and they blame the performer for their gullibility.

  Dean Koontz

  Believe, Errors, Wizardry

  Dean Koontz (2014). “Odd Thomas: You Are Destined to Be Together Forever (Short Story)”, p.154, Bantam

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• The most ingenious men continually pretend to condemn tricking--but this is often done that they may use it more conveniently themselves, when some great occasion or interest offers itself to them.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Men, Deception, Use

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• Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.

  Alberto Manguel

  Ignorance, Creating, Illumination

  "A History of Reading". Book by Alberto Manguel, 1996.

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• Good advertising should give the reader essential facts about the product or company advertised and should do so engagingly without trickery or hogwash.

  Leo Burnett

  Giving, Essentials, Hogwash

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• Misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Two, Confusion, World

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elizabeth Mayer, Louise Bogan, Wystan Hugh Auden (1971). “The sorrows of young Werther, and Novella”

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• Yet is beauty the pleasing trickery that cheateth half the world.

  Martin Farquhar Tupper

  Beauty, Half, World

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• A political philosophy (often called "political science" by practitioners who are not averse from verbal trickery) must deal with contemporary realities. If it does not, if it is charged with "ideals," it is merely a variety of romantic fiction, although it may not be recognized as such.

  Revilo P. Oliver

  Philosophy, Reality, Political

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• It was one of the primary rules of thievery. When hiding, sneaking, and trickery are all out, the correct answer is "run like hell."

  Ari Marmell

  Running, Answers, Hell

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• All fiction for me is a kind of magic and trickery, a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't.

  Angus Wilson

  Believe, People, Magic

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• Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it, one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it. One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to trickery, however happy, or to vulgarism, in order to dodge the difficulty.

  Guy de Maupassant

  Order, Giving, Wish

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• You know you can usually solve almost any problem, or you'll realize you can't, but usually you can solve almost any problem through some sort of trickery one way or another and get the shot to work, but you know when to give up.

  Dennis Muren

  Giving Up, Problem, Realizing

  Source: collider.com

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• I think it takes a lot of trickery to keep up with the media and its perception of you. I don't know if I have it in me most of the time to care. The music is made first, and the interviews or photos to keep it alive come later as a necessary evil, I suppose.

  Jack White

  Thinking, Media, Evil

  "Jack White: 'Is it fun to make music? I don't really know' - an in-depth Q&A from the vaults". Interview with Barney Hoskyns, www.theguardian.com. April 3, 2012.

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• Careful observation will confirm that virtually all spontaneous parapsychological events occur through some form of sleight of mind. It is invariably something hovering just below the threshold of awareness that initiated an unusual event or gave one a curious half sensed feeling that something was about to happen just before it did. The magician seeks to exploid this effect deliberately, but in doing so he must avoid doing it deliberately as it were. Conscious lust of result destroys magical effect, so trickery must be employed to annul it and to activate the subconscious.

  Peter J. Carroll

  Feelings, Lust, Mind

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• Winterson has her own unmistakeable voice, tuned to express her obsessional preoccupation with sexual passion raised to the power of revealed religion. (...) The whole book is a kind of chant. It is a playful addition to the Winterson oeuvre. Yet it is not a slight work so much as, homonymically, a work of sleight- - a word for which the Shorter OED gives six definitions, ranging from trickery to wisdom, all of which apply to The.PowerBook.

  Victoria Glendinning

  Book, Passion, Voice

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• The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honour or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Men, Wish, Desire

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2006). “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, p.59, Penguin UK

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• A few minutes later, she was once again riding her own horse. Deciding to take the lead, she nudged the mare into a trot, and as she passed Brodick and Ramsey, she called out, "You used trickery." "Yes, I did," he admitted. "Are you angry with me?" She laughed again. "I don't get angry. I get even." Unbeknownst to her, she had just recited the Buchanan creed.

  Julie Garwood

  Horse, Riding, Used

  Julie Garwood (2002). “Ransom”, p.313, Simon and Schuster

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• It may well be that by trickery of priests men have sometimes taken a mortal's voice for a god's. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god's voice takes it for a man's.

  C. S. Lewis

  Taken, Men, Voice

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• Taren Ferry folk had a reputation for slyness and trickery. If you shook hands with a Taren Ferry man, people said, you counted your fingers afterwards.

  Robert Jordan

  Men, Hands, People

  Robert Jordan (2000). “The Eye of the World: Book One of 'The Wheel of Time'”, p.160, Macmillan

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• You're killing me here, Ash. Good, she said. She'd bend a few rules, but they both knew she wasn't going to push him beyond where he chose to go. Love wasn't to be based on trickery. But reminding him what he's refusing isn't trickery.

  Melissa Marr

  Ashes, Killing, Said

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• I don't like camera trickery and editing and doubles and all of that.

  Drew Barrymore

  Editing, Cameras

  Interview with Sam Adams, film.avclub.com. October 1, 2009.

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