Sleight Of Hand Quotes

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

  William Congreve

  Hands, Understanding, Admiration

  1695 Valentine. Love for Love, act 4, sc.21.

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• The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight-of-hand that was ever invented.

  Josiah Stamp

  Hands, Historical, Bankers

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• If your sleight of hand causes you to break eye contact with your audience, it is too advanced for your skill level.

  Jeff McBride

  Eye, Hands, Skills

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• A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat.…We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because we are in it, we are part of it. Actually we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference beween us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick.

  Jostein Gaarder

  Hands, White, Differences

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• I have loved works of fiction precisely for their illusions, for the author's sleight-of-hand in showing me the magic, what appeared in the right hand but not in the left.

  Amy Tan

  Hands, Magic, Fiction

  Amy Tan (2005). “Saving Fish from Drowning”, p.114, Penguin

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• Our world is very dishonest, and our leaders encourage dishonesty by setting bad examples - by lying, being corrupt, and using political sleight of hand to sustain power.

  Stuart Wilde

  Lying, Our World, Hands

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• The fact is that the camera is literal if anything, which gives it something in common with a thermometer... Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty. There is sleight of hand in photography... you make the viewer think he's seeing everything while at the same time you make him realize he's not. I try to make my pictures seem reasonable and then, at the last minute, pull the rug from beneath the viewer's feet, very gently so there's a little thrill.

  John Loengard

  Photography, Reality, Thinking

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• When [the magician] clicks his fingers and cards change to the four aces, we know we have experienced sleight of hand. Real magic would not be quite that quick and easy. Real magic would take investment. Real magic would draw you in, and make you nervous.

  Derren Brown

  Real, Hands, Magic

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• Storytelling draws on the magic of language to created Elsewheres. Writers use a linguistic sleight-of-hand to take an attribute, attach them to new objects, and create enchantment.

  Maria Tatar

  Hands, Magic, Enchantment

  Maria Tatar (2009). “Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood”, p.80, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Lovers always believe one another's sleight-of-hand tricks.

  Mason Cooley

  Love, Believe, Hands

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• Jargon is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false. The line between serious and spurious scholarship is an easy one to blur, with jargon on your side.

  David Lehman

  Hands, Your Side, Ideas

  David Lehman (1992). “Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man”, Poseidon Pr

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• A lot of the audience know that magic tricks are largely sleight of hand stuff, but they're intrigued by the mind stuff. They understand some of the principles behind it . . . but they're confused by how it's all mixed together onstage, which is good for me.

  Keith Barry

  Confused, Hands, Magic

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• Susan Straight finds LA's secret heart in Between Heaven and Here and with a sleight of hand only the masters have, she creates an alley, a neighborhood, a history that is as rich and tragic as any Shakespearean tale.

  Walter Mosley

  Heart, Hands, Heaven

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• I suppose that if I could only do one thing, a solid card effect would be pretty high on the list. That's the root of it all, sleight-of-hand. It's certainly the thing I feel most comfortable with.

  Ricky Jay

  Hands, Roots, Cards

  Interview with Joshua Klein, www.avclub.com. August 12, 1998.

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• Elton John can be a master of the sleight of hand. The arrangements make it seem like there are substantial melodies underneath the tracks - but almost nothing demands repeated listenings. Similarly, he always sounds like he's singing up a storm, but his voice glosses over the material, reducing most things to an uninteresting sameness.

  Jon Landau

  Hands, Voice, Track

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• My own literary interest is more about excavating the past, or sensing the past inside the present. This requires all kinds of exclusions and sleights of hand. There's an admittedly antiquarian flavor to it, even though there's enough of the present included to lull the reader.

  Teju Cole

  Past, Hands, Flavor

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• You'll only find happy endings in books. Some books.

  Ellen Hopkins

  Book, Happy Endings

  Ellen Hopkins (2008). “Burned”, p.420, Simon and Schuster

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• Each of the essays in this volume ranges widely across technical and philosophical domains. They examine both familiar automatons from throughout history and delight us with yet more that will likely be unfamiliar to most readers. But the real treat of the essays is how they will make Artificial Life researchers squirm as they recognize their own intellectual sleights of hand exposed for all to see. Those researchers and the Genesis Redux contributors are all ultimately interested in what it is that truly distinguishes us beings from other lumps of matter.

  Rodney Brooks

  Real, Philosophical, Hands

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• In the winters, I enrolled in the hotel management program at Cornell University. I naively thought that I knew something about sleight-of-hand, entertainment and food, and that would be all I needed.

  Ricky Jay

  Winter, Hands, Entertainment

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• But if you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.

  Josiah Stamp

  Bankers, Cost, Banking

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• The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing.

  Josiah Stamp

  Bankers, Banking, Modern

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• Falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked. . .The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.

  John Cheever

  Lying, Hands, Feelings

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• Brave, bold men, these are what we want. What we want is vigor in the blood, strength in the nerves, iron muscles and nerves of steel, not softening namby-pamby ideas. Avoid all these. Avoid all mystery. There is no mystery in religion. Is there any mystery in the Vedanta, or in the Vedas, or in the Samhitâs, or in the Puranas? What secret societies did the sages of yore establish to preach their religion? What sleight-of-hand tricks are there recorded as used by them to bring their grand truths to humanity?

  Swami Vivekananda

  Motivational, Men, Blood

  Swami Vivekananda “Lectures Vol. 3”, Jazzybee Verlag

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• All these wars are similar in the way ideology is being used. It's the ideology of so-called humanitarian intervention. We don't want to do this, but we're doing this for the sake of the people who live there. This is, of course, a terrible sleight of hand because all sorts of people live there, and, by and large, they do it to help one faction and not the other.

  Tariq Ali

  War, Hands, People

  Interview with David Barsamian, www.thirdworldtraveler.com. January 2002.

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• Dai Vernon, the greatest sleight of hand figure in the history of the art, rarely performed. But he invented magic and had an enormous influence on the whole range of sleight of hand. And so often the magic he was doing was to fool other magicians.

  Ricky Jay

  Art, Hands, Magic

  "Seven Lies About Lying". Interview with Errol Morris, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com. August 5, 2009.

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