Quotes & Sayings About Hocus Pocus

Want to lose weight? Kick a bad habit? Well you might want to try hypnosis! ... no longer regarded as mere hocus-pocus, it's been shown as an effective means of helping people quit smoking, shed pounds, reduce stress, and end phobias. — Jane Pauley

Jiggery pokery!" said Harry in a fierce voice. "Hocus pocus - squiggly wiggly - "
"MUUUUUUM!" howled Dudley, "He's doing you know what! — J.K. Rowling

A lot of nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless education, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well. — Kurt Vonnegut

I do not believe that Obama is smarter than anybody else. I do not believe he has cut a new path and is a politician unlike any we've ever seen regarding his intellect. I don't believe any of this hocus-pocus. I didn't believe it when they said it about Hillary, Smartest Woman in the World. — Rush Limbaugh

So tell me something, how did you do that earlier trick?"
Ravyn grimaced. "What trick?"
"The cat thing. How did you switch?"
Why did humans always want that question answered? Even if he explained it, it wasn't like they could do it. "It's magick," he said sarcastically. "I mumble hocus-pocus and the next thing you know, I'm a cat."
She narrowed her eyes at him. "I suppose it's a step up. The last guy I had in my house could only turn into a beer-drinking Pig. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much. — Kurt Vonnegut

You gotta realize that the whole fiasco of the environment, all this global warming hocus-pocus - which the only thing it's done is made Al Gore a multi-millionaire - but, what it's done is, it has been used as a way to curtail growth, to destroy the growth, exploration. — Rafael Cruz

I pity the Jews trying to get through life with only half a Bible. That's like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa.
Grandfather Wills , Hocus Pocus — Kurt Vonnegut

Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, hully-gully, roly-poly, holy moly, herky-jerky, walkie-talkie, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo, loosey-goosey, wing-ding, wham-bam, hobnob, razza-matazz, and rub-a-dub-dub? I thought you'd never ask. Consonants differ in "obstruency" - the degree to which they impede the flow of air, ranging from merely making it resonate, to forcing it noisily past an obstruction, to stopping it up altogether. The word beginning with the less obstruent consonant always comes before the word beginning with the more obstruent consonant. Why ask why? — Steven Pinker

Achievement is no hocus-pocus. It's focus, focus! — Ana Claudia Antunes

I seem to remember there was some hocus-pocus with that one."
"You mean hanky-panky!" shouted Ruth. "There was hanky panky. — E. Lockhart

Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn't stand the complete unadultness - the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers. No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself that was it - he'd come upon it early and intuitively, and however elemental, that was the whole of it. Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body. — Philip Roth

I once heard someone say that success is not hocus pocus but focus focus. — David

Look, I don't want to stand here and watch you commune with 'other.' It's been a long night, my brain is fried and my emotions shot. You can stay here and do your hocus-pocus cat prowl, looking for your invisible friends all you want. I'm going to head off to my media room and veg. (Danger)
If you need me, call. (Alexion)
Yeah, I'll just do that when I need the great big, hulking he-man to charge in and save my weak, girly butt. (Danger) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

That phrase "hocus-pocus" started out as "hocus-pocus dominocus", and was, in the beginning, a mocking imitation of the holy incantations of the Catholic Church's Latin liturgy. So say the lexicologists. — L. M. Boyd

I persist in preferring philosophers to rabbis priests imams ayatollahs and mullahs. Rather than trust their theological hocus-pocus I prefer to draw on alternatives to the dominant philosophical historiography: the laughers materialists radicals cynics hedonists atheists sensualists voluptuaries. They know that there is only one world and that promotion of an afterlife deprives us of the enjoyment and benefit of the only one there is. A genuinely deadly sin. — Michel Onfray

Rachel snorted derisively. "You don't seriously buy into all her prophetess hocus-pocus, do you?"
"I do, actually," Notak said, frowning. "She is the augur, Rachel."
"She's exasperating!"
"She is eccentric," Notak corrected. "And you would be too if you had lived the life she had."
"She's a whore!" Rachel spat, ignoring him.
Notak looked at her, plainly puzzled. "I am fairly certain that she is a virgin, actually. — S.G. Night

Will I, succeed, paranoid from the weed and hocus pocus, try to focus but I can't see. — Tupac Shakur

Magician, musician. Same thing. A little hocus pocus and a whole lot of faith, right? — Tiffanie DeBartolo

Hocus was an old cunning attorney. The words of consecration, "Hoc est corpus," were travestied into a nickname for jugglery, as "Hocus-pocus." - John Richard Green, A Short History of the English People, 1874. see Charles Macklin. — John Arbuthnot

Expose foes wit my hocus pocus flows, they froze now suckas idolize my chosen blows — Tupac Shakur

The twelve or fifteen millions in the British Empire, who, while they possess no electoral rights, are yet persuaded they are freemen, and who are mystified into the notion that they are not political bondmen, by that great juggle of the ' English Constitution ' a thing of monopolies, and Church-craft, and sinecures, armorial hocus-pocus, primogeniture, and pageantry! — Richard Cobden

A dreaded society is not a civilized society. The most progressive and powerful society in the civilized sense, is a society which has recognized its ethos, and come to terms with the past and the present, with religion and science. With modernism and mysticism, with materialism and spirituality; a society free of tension, a society rich in culture. Such a society cannot come with hocus-pocus formulas and with fraud. It has to flow from the depth of a divine search. — Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

Besides, I'm not looking to get saved. I'm only going with her because it's what you do when you're in a relationship. You know? You slide into the third pew from the front and sit there thinking about how desperate all these people are to feel like something loves them. They'll believe all kinds of hocus-pocus. But your girlfriend likes it, and you like her, so you do it. It's called compromise. The only way you're going to get something to last in this world is to work at it. — Tim Tharp

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket; and the glorious uncertainty of it is of mair use to the professors than the justice of it. — Charles Macklin

There's always been this hocus-pocus or magical, mystical thing associated with the making of film that sort of psyches people out and makes them think that this cannot be done; that this is a craft that cannot be learned. — Spike Lee

In tribal times, there were the medicine men. In the Middle Ages, there were the priests. Today, there are the lawyers. For every age, a group of bright boys, learned in their trades and jealous of their learning, who blend technical competence with plain and fancy hocus-pocus to make themselves masters of their fellow men. For every age, a pseudo-intellectual autocracy, guarding the tricks of the trade from the uninitiated, and running, after its own pattern, the civilization of its day. — Fred Rodell

Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too. — Carl Lotus Becker

I mumble hocus-pocus and the next thing you know, I'm a cat. (Ravyn)
I suppose it's a step up. The last guy I had in my house could only turn into a beer-drinking pig. (Susan) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

If men saw that a term was set to their troubles, they would find strength in some way to withstand the hocus-pocus and intimidations of the prophets. — Lucretius

Go to the phone, dial the number on the screen as fast as you can. Give $50 dollars a month for 10 months, God will do a now miracle ... Wooo! I feel the Holy Spirit ... We are not talking hocus pocus, this is a word from God ... I have come to Dallas and Daystar with a word from God ... God is speaking to people to give $5,000. — Steve Munsey

Hocus Pocus let's try to focus — Ellen Potter

Beer, of course, is actually a depressant, but poor people will never stop hoping otherwise. — Kurt Vonnegut

She would have said that love was hocus-pocus, a deception, and she believed that. But at the prospect she still felt a hush, a flutter along the nerves, a bowing down of sense, a flagrant postration — Alice Munro

I put a spell on you and now you're mine. You can't stop the things I do. I ain't lying. — Screamin' Jay Hawkins

SHE RESEARCHED WHEN everyone slept. In the dead silence, her mind worked with more clarity. No interruptions, no worries. Sometimes she even imagined that her ancestors guided her. That they reached out from the past to share their stories.
"Hocus Pocus!" she thought, smiling. Her inside joke was a source of inspiration.
But her imagination was not far-fetched.
My second cousin, twice removed, is a family historian. She is also a lawyer. And this is why I chose her. I needed her to do me a favor. I chose her, although she is a business lawyer and not a criminal lawyer. That was fine by me. It's not like my lawyers did a superb job at defending me. I was wrongfully executed. — Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini

The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by. — John Steinbeck

Scary movies are my favorite. My kids love Hocus Pocus. I'm a big fan of Sleepy Hollow with Johnny Depp and Freddy Krueger. — Andre Dirrell

No, not of course at all - it is really all hocus-pocus. The days lengthen in the winter-time, and when the longest comes, the twenty-first of June, the beginning of summer, they begin to go downhill again, toward winter. You call that 'of course'; but if one once loses hold of the fact that it is of course, it is quite frightening, you feel like hanging on to something. It seems like a practical joke - that spring begins at the beginning of winter, and autumn at the beginning of summer. You feel you're being fooled, led about in a circle, with your eye fixed on something that turns out to be a moving point. A moving point in a circle. For the circle consists of nothing but such transitional points without any extent whatever; the curvature is incommensurable, there is no duration of motion, and eternity turns out to be not 'straight ahead' but 'merry-go-round'! — Thomas Mann

The biggest distraction in life to one's focus is often near locus standing people saying all hocus-pocus. — Anuj

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 ... In fact, the Athanasian paradox that one is three, and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself. He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.
[Letter to James Smith discussing Jefferson's hate of the doctrine of the Christian trinity, December 8 1822] — Thomas Jefferson

The shell game that we play ... is technically called 'renormalization'. But no matter how clever the word, it is still what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent. It's surprising that the theory still hasn't been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; I suspect that renormalization is not mathematically legitimate. — Richard P. Feynman

Success isn't magic or hocus-pocus - it's simply learning how to focus. — Jack Canfield