"Hocus-pocus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... respect," said the fat detective, pompously. "House is full of Indian curiosities. Thaddeus brought this up, and if this splinter be poisonous Thaddeus may as well have made murderous use of it as any other man. The card is some hocus-pocus,—a blind, as like as not. The only question is, how did he depart? Ah, of course, here is a hole in the roof." With great activity, considering his bulk, he sprang up the steps and squeezed through into the garret, and immediately afterwards we heard his ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... harm in trying! A pound's a pound, there's no denying; But think what thousands and thousands of pounds We pay for nothing but hearing sounds: Sounds of Equity, Justice, and Law, Parliamentary jabber and jaw, Pious cant, and moral saw, Hocus-pocus, and Nong-tong-paw, And empty sounds not worth a straw; Why, it costs a guinea, as I'm a sinner, To hear the sounds at a public dinner! One pound one thrown into the puddle, To listen to Fiddle, Faddle, and Fuddle! Not to forget the sounds we buy From those who ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... because such was the plan of creation; and we find rudimental organs and similarity of plan, because it has pleased the Creator to set before Himself a "divine exemplar or archetype," and to copy it in His works; and somewhat ill, those who hold this view imply, in some of them. That such verbal hocus-pocus should be received as science will one day be regarded as evidence of the low state of intelligence in the nineteenth century, just as we amuse ourselves with the phraseology about Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum, wherewith Torricellis compatriots were satisfied ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... scorn in ballads and mystery plays. In one church a Protestant lawyer raised a dog in his hands when the priest elevated the host. The most sacred words of the old worship, the words of consecration, "Hoc est corpus," were travestied into a nickname for jugglery as "Hocus-pocus." ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... attendants' room,[n] occupying the position of a menial, not of a free-born boy! {259} Then, when you became a man, you used to read out the books[n] to your mother at her initiations, and help her in the rest of the hocus-pocus, by night dressing the initiated[n] in fawnskins, drenching them from the bowl, purifying them and wiping them down with the clay and the bran, and (when they were purified) bidding them stand up and say, 'The ill is done, the good ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... lacked; she made the allowances for human nature's ignorance and superstition which he refused to make; she lessened the hardship of taking her common-sense prescriptions by veiling them in medical hocus-pocus—a compromise of the disagreeable truth which her father had always inveighed against as both immoral ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... a laugh to raise! Pray don't be so fastidious! She But as a leech, her hocus-pocus plays, That well with you her potion may agree. (He compels FAUST ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... is only done to smoke us; Don't be so serious, my man! She must, as Doctor, play her hocus-pocus To make the dose work better, that's the plan. [He constrains FAUST to step into ...
— Faust • Goethe
... no harm in trying! A pound's a pound there's no denying; But think what thousands and thousands of pounds We pay for nothing but hearing sounds: Sounds of Equity, Justice, and Law, Parliamentary jabber and jaw, Pious cant and moral saw, Hocus-pocus, and Nong-tong-paw, And empty sounds not worth a straw; Why it costs a guinea, as I'm a sinner, To hear the sounds at a Public Dinner! One pound one thrown into the puddle, To listen to Fiddle, Faddle, and Fuddle! ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... mere undoing, or change merely as change. And moreover, if we believed that it would be unconditionally hastened by our getting the franchise, we should be what I call superstitious men, believing in magic, or the production of a result by hocus-pocus. Our getting the franchise will greatly hasten that good end in proportion only as every one of us has the knowledge, the foresight, the conscience, that will make him well-judging and scrupulous in the use ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... said, "Tails, go." He opened his hand, and looked at the coin. "Heads! Very good. Go on with your hocus-pocus, ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... longer have said. He thought he worshiped the truth, but he did not. He knew that the truth was everything, but a lie came that seemed better than the truth. In his soul he knew he was not acting truly; that had he honestly loved the truth, he would not have played hocus-pocus with metaphysics and logic, but would have made haste to a manly conclusion. He took the package, and on his way to the dining-room, dropped it into the post-box in ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... With a hocus-pocus of incantations she brews the magic draught, which Faust drinks. He is then hurried away by Mephistopheles back into the world ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... any other probate judge. He speculated—maybe for only the better part of ten seconds—but he speculated upon the entity of the small human being that had fallen within the bounds of his court. Was it really for this little girl's best good to let this aunt by marriage take charge of her? Did any hocus-pocus contriving, with which he had become only too familiar, lie beneath ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... German missionaries in the country, doing good work in a funny, fussy, rigorous fashion of their own. They'd raise a dickens of a hocus-pocus back in Germany if they once suspected their government of playing that game. No. But Germany intends to stand off the other powers, while Turks tackle the Armenians; and the ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... that were taken seriously. Behind the hocus-pocus of such fine-sounding words, the bombast, the theatrical clash and clang of the swords and pasteboard helmets, there was always the incurable futility of a Sardou, the intrepid vaudevillist, playing Punch and Judy with history. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... The things he chiefly argued for were anti-Christian things—the abandonment of the purely moral view of life, the rehabilitation of instinct, the dethronement of weakness and timidity as ideals, the renunciation of the whole hocus-pocus of dogmatic religion, the extermination of false aristocracies (of the priest, of the politician, of the plutocrat), the revival of the healthy, lordly "innocence" that was Greek. If he was anything in a word, Nietzsche was a Greek born two thousand years too late. His dreams were thoroughly ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... during the performance of the symphony; his greedy eyes had rested on her all the while. He became enraged: "You don't imagine that progress can be made by such amateurish efforts?" he said with a roar. "It is all hocus-pocus. There is as a matter of fact no such thing as progress in art, any more than there is progress in the course of the ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... wi' me to Bodmin Fair to-morrow for a treat, an' see the Great Turk and the Fat 'Ooman and hocus-pocus. So tell me ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... views, which, I confess, to be sustained in their main features by my own views and researches here on the ground and in the midst of the Indians, and men will rise to sustain the old views—the original literary mummery and philological hocus-pocus based on the papers and letters and blunders of Heckewelder. There was a great predisposition to admire and overrate everything relative to Indian history and language, as detailed by this good and sincere missionary in his retirement at Bethlehem. He was appealed ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... have never done mischief unless they intended to do it. That is why great scoundrels have been beneficent rulers whilst amiable and privately harmless monarchs have ruined their countries by trusting to the hocus-pocus of innocence and guilt, reward and punishment, virtuous indignation and pardon, instead of standing up to the facts without either malice or mercy. Major Barbara stands up to Bill Walker in that way, with the result that the ruffian who cannot get hated, has to ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... in Saint Rochus They made him stand and wait his doom; And, as if he were condemned to the tomb, Began to mutter their hocus-pocus. First, the Mass for the Dead they chanted, Then three times laid upon his head A shovelful of churchyard clay, Saying to him, as he stood undaunted, "This is a sign that thou art dead, So in thy heart be penitent!" And forth from the chapel door he went Into disgrace and banishment, Clothed ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... forty-second Andrew Ferrary, in single combat; whereupon, as might reasonably be expected, he would, in the twinkling of a farthing rushlight, fall down as dead as a bag of sand; yet, by their rictum-ticktum, rise-up-Jack, slight-of-hand, hocus-pocus way, would be on his legs, brushing the stour from his breeches knees, before the green curtain was half-way down. James Batter himself once told me, that, when he was a laddie, he saw one of these clanjamphrey go in behind the ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... kept away from that kind of woman. A man has to have women in his life no matter how much you talk about it—but I took the kind with the price-tag because when you paid them you were through. I could have married a dozen times if I'd wanted but I didn't want—that old hocus-pocus of tradition was still with me, stronger than death—I thought I knew the kind of wife I wanted and she was ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... natur; you foolish old file you! He diddled you with that hocus-pocus, did he? Yarbs and natur will cure your incurable ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... would resign all hope of immortality to save a single human soul from the hell of Mr. Spurgeon. But is not the hell of Mr. Spurgeon the hell of the New Testament? Does not Jesus speak of everlasting fire? Why seek to limit the duration of hell by some hocus-pocus of interpretation? It is idle to pretend that "everlasting" means something less than everlasting. If it means that in relation to hell it must also mean it in relation to heaven. Dr. Farrar cannot have two ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... until she had made her own conditions. "And Saul sware to her by the Lord, saying: as the Lord liveth, there shall no punishment happen to you for this thing." And then having brought the King to terms, by cunning hocus-pocus she summoned Samuel from the cold, cold grave. First there was a hush, then a sweeping in of chill, damp air, a scent of decay, the shaking out of a shroud that never rustled, a rush of silent footsteps, and suddenly the door untouched swung noiselessly open and Samuel, ...
— Fair to Look Upon • Mary Belle Freeley
... rose-coloured mist. But what I do in my trade, I do to sell. What all we fellows do, we do to sell. If we didn't want to sell it for the most we can get for it, we shouldn't do it. Being work, it has to be done; but it's easily enough done. All the rest is hocus-pocus. ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... the cheap hocus-pocus of it—but the next moment a more violent emotion swept over him as he saw Diane seized and borne ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... I see! Pipes and iron safes and hocus-pocus! But I do not care!" He turned to Doloria and, taking one of her hands, said: "You, mon ami, shall find your heart's best desire. It is I who say it!—I, who have the authority!" The way he clung to that authority ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... which gave it triumph over the polytheism of the ancients, sickened with the absurdities of their own theology. Nor was the unity of the Supreme Being ousted from the Christian creed by the force of reason, but by the sword of civil government, wielded at the will of the fanatic Athanasius. The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs. And a strong proof of the solidity of the primitive faith, is its restoration, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... sound "first principles are kept in mind," any other conclusion can be reached, whether by jumping, or by any other mode of logical progression. But the first principle which our author "keeps in mind" possesses just that amount of ambiguity which enables him to play hocus-pocus with it. It is this; that "the creation of value does not depend upon the finishing of ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... land?" I queried: for I did not understand all this hocus-pocus of locating any given spot in the Iowa prairies ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... "we can be good friends all the same. We don't need a hocus-pocus of false sentiment. We are men, aren't we?—men of sublime good sense." And just here, as the old man looked at me, the pressure of his hands deepened to a convulsive grasp, and the bloodless mask of his ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... great hocus-pocus," he said, "you know, I believe you. If two fellows were having a pitched battle most of the girls I know would quietly faint or run, but I do believe that you would stand by and help a fellow if ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... be justified in believing either that one's senses were deluded, or that one had not really got to the bottom of the phenomenon. Of course, if one could vary the conditions, if one could take a little silex, and by a little hocus-pocus a la crosse, galvanise a baby out of it as often as one pleased, all the philosopher could do would be to hold up his hands and cry, "God is great." But short of evidence of this kind, I don't mean to ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... or was I merely the victim of a gigantic and most elaborate hoax? How was it possible that I, a rational man, not unacquainted with the leading scientific facts of our history, and hitherto an absolute and utter disbeliever in all the hocus-pocus which in Europe goes by the name of the supernatural, could believe that I had within the last few minutes been engaged in conversation with a woman two thousand and odd years old? The thing was contrary to the experience of human nature, and absolutely and utterly impossible. ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... papers gnashed their teeth and looked on. Nor was the whole truth told by a long way, but a garbled version about foreign coves who worked the business and bolted, and a doting father who never consented to it—and such a hash-up and hocus-pocus as would have made a ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... the legislature, and what recourse is there left to the people but 'Boulangism'? 'Boulangism' is the instinctive, more or less deliberate and articulate, outcry of a people living under constitutional forms, but conscious that, by some hocus-pocus, the vitality has been taken out of those forms. It is the expression of the general sense of insecurity. In a country situated as France now is, it is natural that this inarticulate outcry should merge itself at first into a clamour for the revision of a ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... my lady,' he said, 'it won't do. Mr. Churchill is a man above hocus-pocus. Well I know it that have had dealings with him. But ... well, the long and the short of it is, my lady, that you can't touch pitch and not be defiled; or, leastwise, people'll think you've been defiled—those that don't know you. ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... whole matter were really a hocus-pocus. Suppose that whatever meaning you may choose in your fancy to give to it, the real meaning of the whole was mockery. Suppose ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... will undertake to drain it, with immense advantage to the neighbouring proprietors. If a valley intervenes, he will bridge it with a viaduct, which shall put to shame the grandest relics of antiquity. He has no knowledge of such bugbears as steep gradients or dangerous curves; a little hocus-pocus with the compasses transforms all these into gentle undulations, and sweeps of the most graceful description. He will run you his rails right through the heart of the most populous city,—yea, even Glasgow herself,—and across the streets, without the slightest interruption to the traffic. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... answered, "come and try. Now, hold it so while I say the spell," and I muttered some hocus-pocus, then directed it towards certain of the Mazitu who were gathering again. "There! Look! Look! You have hit them in the eye. You are a master of magic. They run, they run!" and run they did indeed. "Is there anyone ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... a general, suah," and then there followed low, rollicking laughter, mingled with a gurgling as of a liquid swallowed from a flask. "But how'll we manage at the junction? We can't go right on the cars? There is some hocus-pocus about everything ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... it that LEDEBOUR said of it? Did he not describe it as "a political hocus-pocus"? Such men ought to be at once taken out and shot. But we Prussians have always been too ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... Aunt Zeruah insists upon it that the way is to put the whole house in order, and shut all the blinds, and sit in your bedroom, and then, she says, nothing gets out of place; and she tells poor Sophie the most hocus-pocus stories about her grandmothers and aunts, who always kept everything in their houses so that they could go and lay their hands on it in the darkest night. I'll bet they could in our house. From end to end it is kept looking as if we had shut it up and gone to Europe,—not a book, not a paper, not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... trial. He's fled back to his cell and stands there as dignified as if he was going to lay a cornerstone. He's a grave rebuke to the whole situation, as you might say. Then the Judge and Cale go through some kind of a hocus-pocus talk, winding up with both of them saying 'Not guilty!' in a loud voice; and Myron says to Pete: 'There! You had your trial; now get out of my jail ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... queer, hocus-pocus business on foot," muttered Hal, bitterly. "But I don't believe Jack feels much like telling us anything about it ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... drought has lasted a long time, people drop the usual hocus-pocus of imitative magic altogether, and being far too angry to waste their breath in prayer they seek by threats and curses or even downright physical force to extort the waters of heaven from the supernatural being who has, so to say, cut ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... transformations—only the transformations are so infinitely slow, and attended with such struggle and suffering. Strike out the element of time and we have before us a spectacle more novel and startling than any hocus-pocus or legerdemain that ever set the ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... up for it, and thus sin became as safe as it was easy. Inevitably also such a theory of worship often degenerated into an utter formalism which made hyprocrisy and unreality patent, until the hoc est corpus of the mass became the hocus-pocus of the scoffer. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... him with a vague, nameless fear. Forty years he wears the mysterious thing, dies and is buried with it, and in all that time they never have a glimpse of his face. Though there is a deal of nonsense in the story, and a hocus-pocus instead of a mystery, we must remember that veil as a striking symbol of the loneliness of life, of the gulf that separates a human soul from ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... the more impressive, and tell more effectually. Yet I wish sincerely to help poor Hogg, and have written to Lockhart about it. It may be my own desolate feelings—it may be the apprehension of evil from this political hocus-pocus, but I have seldom felt more moody and uncomfortable than while writing these lines. I have walked, too, but without effect. W. Laidlaw, whose very ingenious mind is delighted with all novelties, talked nonsense about the new government, in which men are to resign ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... reason I need music. But Wagner makes one ill—What do I care about the theatre? What do I care about the spasms of its moral ecstasies in which the mob—and who is not the mob to-day?—rejoices? What do I care about the whole pantomimic hocus-pocus of the actor? You are beginning to see that I am essentially anti-theatrical at heart. For the stage, this mob art par excellence, my soul has that deepest scorn felt by every artist to-day. With a stage success a man sinks to such an extent in my esteem as to drop out of sight; failure ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... insist upon it. And another thing, I won't have her thumped about all over the chest, or any hocus-pocus of the sort. She has bronchitis and asthma, and that's all. If you can cure it well and good. But it only weakens her to have you tapping and listening, and it does no ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Then she pulled off all that was upon her of raiment and ornaments and fine linen and taking Nur al-Din in her arms strained him to her bosom. And they ceased not, she and he, from kissing and clipping and strumming to the tune of "hocus-pocus,"[FN524] saying the while, "How short are the nights of Union and the nights of Disunion how long are they!" and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... ordinary, unaffected mortals to glory in their mortality. It is too much the habit of Gods to pretend to die when they don't really die at all—when, in fact, the whole idea is a mere intellectual hocus-pocus. ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... sort o' hocus-pocus might that be, I want to know—did somebody blow that light out just when I was hopin' big things might come from it, or was it only a bunch o' cabbage palms that come in between me ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... by planting a stake at the top of flood, you can neither prevent nor delay the inevitable ebb. There is no hocus-pocus in morality; and even the "sanctimonious ceremony" of marriage leaves the man unchanged. This is a hard saying, and has an air of paradox. For there is something in marriage so natural and inviting, that the step has an air of great simplicity and ease; it offers ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... term the hocus-pocus side of the case," he replied, "turns on matters Egyptian, doesn't it? Very well. Who else, that we know about, is associated, or ever ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... the girls!" he put in (his ears evidently are as sharp as mine); "the inquiries having proceeded from Franklin, it was only natural for me to suspect that he was trying to mislead us by some hocus-pocus story. So I visited the girls. That I had difficulty in getting to the root of the matter is to their credit, Miss Butterworth, seeing that you ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... resulting in the slight return to sanity on Albert's part involved in falling in love with her, and a very considerable advance towards insanity on hers by falling in love with him. But perhaps this give-and-take of lovers may seem attractive to some. And when after a time we get into mere hocus-pocus, and it seems to Consuelo that Albert's violin "speaks and utters words as through the mouth of Satan," the same persons may think it fine. For myself, I believe that without fatuity I may claim to be, if not a visionnaire (perhaps that also), at least a lover of visions, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury |
