"Legerdemain" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... itself up to the control of metre, not led by blind habit, but because it thus finds the joy of motion. There are foolish persons who think that metre is a species of verbal gymnastics, or legerdemain, of which the object is to win the admiration of the crowd. That is not so. Metre is born as all beauty is born the universe through. The current set up within well-defined bounds gives metrical verse power to move the minds of men as vague ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... these happenings, though wonderful and unusual, had seemed to be, after all, inside the circle of possible things wonderful as the chemical experiments are where two liquids poured together make fire, surprising as legerdemain, thrilling as a juggler's display, but nothing more. Only now a new feeling came to him as he walked through those gardens; by day those gardens were like dreams, at night they were like visions. He could not see his feet as he walked, but he saw the movement of the ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... with a single jerk, the strips of white tablecloth from the shining mahogany. The silver and the glasses had been removed, the word was given, and the strips of tablecloth vanished as though by some swift legerdemain. The port was passed round, and while the glasses were being filled the telegram was handed ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... rest are 23 in number. One might call them an Iliad [Homer's Iliad consists of 24 books] of sophists." (C. R. 2, 180.) Melanchthon, too, repeatedly designates Eck and Faber as the authors of the Confutation. July 14 he wrote to Luther: "With his legerdemain (commanipulatione) Eck presented to the Emperor the Confutation of our Confession." (193.) August 6: "This Confutation is the most nonsensical of all the nonsensical books of Faber." (253.) August 8, to Myconius: "Eck and Faber have worked for six entire weeks in ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... business point of view, a Protestant church service is worth about twenty-five cents for the music, and five cents for the privilege of sleeping on a soft cushion. So you see I lose four dollars and seventy cents every time I attend. You Catholic fellows, with your ceremonial and legerdemain, give a much better entertainment. Besides, I like to hear your priests soak it to ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... fairy-land?' calling him by his name. It was in vain to hesitate, it was impossible to escape, the discovery was complete. It was plain however that the dealer in magical delusions had not altogether given up the art of legerdemain, which, perhaps, he finds the most ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... I sat down and turned my situation over in my mind, in which kind of agreeable mental legerdemain I was ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... they bubble into the smoking skillet, the handle of which she seizes at the identical moment that she lets go of the empty bowl with one hand and pushes the red-faced boy over backward with the other. It is legerdemain! But then, how she manages that skillet! How her red cheeks flush, her black eyes sparkle, and her plump hands ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... fathers, their memory fades away and with it their worship gradually falls into complete desuetude. Thus the spirits who receive the homage of these savages were real men of flesh and blood, not mythical beings conjured up by the fancy of their worshippers, which some legerdemain of the mind has foisted into the shrine and encircled with the halo of divinity. Not that the Melanesians do not also worship beings who, so far as we can see, are purely mythical, though their worshippers firmly ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... slack-rope, who was in truth a second Fenella in the sprightliness of her nimble exhibitions. Day Francis, the conjuror, was his admiration. He was delighted with Rannie, the old ventriloquist, and the first in America; and Potter, the late sable and celebrated professor of legerdemain, in slight-of-hand, he thought actually excelled ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... the most remarkable believers in that forgotten and despised science was a late eminent professor of the art of legerdemain. One would have thought that a person of this description ought, from his knowledge of the thousand ways in which human eyes could be deceived, to have been less than others subject to the fantasies of superstition. Perhaps the habitual use of those abstruse calculations by which, in a manner ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Voices is the production of a man of genius. No one can too much admire the legerdemain of the magician who could produce this thing; for it is a story out of the Arabian Nights, told with a perfection of mannerism, a reproduction of the English in which the later translators of the Arabian Nights have seen fit to deal, ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman |
