Quotes & Sayings About Misdirection

What I say is misdirection, what you see is an illusion and what results is magic. — Amit Kalantri

What happened at the end of our last story is something called misdirection. It's what happens when you are led to believe that something is true, but in reality it's not true at all. Misdirection happens a lot in real life- especially in politics, history, education, medicine, marketing, science, religion, and the Oprah Winfrey Network. — Dav Pilkey

Always quick with the wit. It's your defense, isn't it? Little girl doesn't want the world to know how sad she is, how damaged. Your words, your attitude, all a big misdirection. A magician's trick. — Chuck Wendig

And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no "after", in the "ever after" of a Witch there is no "happily"; in the story of a Witch, there is no afterword. Of that part that is beyond the life story, beyond the story of the life, there is-alas, or perhaps thank mercy-no telling. She was dead, dead, and gone, and all that was left of her was the carapace of her reputation for malice. — Gregory Maguire

Miseducation = Misdirection — Matshona Dhliwayo

All the comics are sigils. "Sigil" as a word is out of date. All this magic stuff needs new terminology because it's not what people are being told it is at all. It's not all this wearying symbolic misdirection that's being dragged up from the Victorian Age, when no-one was allowed to talk plainly and everything was in coy poetic code. The world's at a crisis point and it's time to stop bullshitting around with Qabalah and Thelema and Chaos and Information and all the rest of the metaphoric smoke and mirrors designed to make the rubes think magicians are 'special' people with special powers. It's not like that. Everyone does magic all the time in different ways. "Life" plus "significance" = magic. — Grant Morrison

If the ancients had been able to see it as I see it now, Mr. Palomar thinks, they would have thought they had projected their gaze into the heaven of Plato's ideas, or in the immaterial space of the postulates of Euclid; but instead, thanks to some misdirection or other, this sight has been granted to me, who fear it is too beautiful to be true, too gratifying to my imaginary universe to belong to the real world. But perhaps it is this same distrust of our senses that prevents us from feeling comfortable in the universe. Perhaps the first rule I must impose on myself is this: stick to what I see. — Italo Calvino

Kelsier smiled. Gods, it appeared, could still fall for a classic misdirection con. — Brandon Sanderson

The media, I think, have to be accountable for some of the misdirection that is put forward in politics in some of the misapprehension, maybe even some of the lack of confidence in the political process. Because the most benign, frank thought can be twisted and portrayed as something that it really wasn't intended to. — Cory Bernardi

We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty. — Charles Stross

I've been doing the hotel accounting long enough to know that two and two equals whatever you want it to be. It's simply a matter of perception and misdirection. — Jana Deleon

That's the first law of magic, Specs. Misdirection. Never forget it. — Donna Tartt

Finn was an enigma wrapped in a riddle coated in misdirection. He was a burrito of dishonesty. — Molly Harper

Psychological complexity, character development, the killer line to end a scene, villains blotched with virtue, heroic characters speckled with villainy, foreshadow and backflash, artful misdirection. — David Mitchell

FAUSTUS. To have fooled the philosopher.
MAGUS. One finds, in my profession, sir, the greater the intellect, the more ease in its misdirection.
FAUSTUS. One finds the same in mine. — David Mamet

The writers are very good about misdirection and changeups, and that's what's great about it. We always think we know what's going to happen and then they throw a curveball that you don't see coming. — Mike Colter

a finger pointing with particular aim too far from the goal in effect points at everything. — Lindsey Drager

Religion is a salve for confusion and misdirection. — Robert F. Kennedy

Free speech gives us the ability to react vigorously with effective arguments and expose the weakness and misdirection of the other side's claims. — Rush Limbaugh

An illusion has three stages.
"First there is the setup, in which the nature of what might be attempted at is hinted at, or suggested, or explained. The apparatus is seen. volunteers from the audience sometimes participate in preparation. As the trick is being setup, the magician will make use of every possible use of misdirection.
"The performance is where the magician's lifetime of practice, and his innate skill as a performer, cojoin to produce the magical display.
"The third stage is sometimes called the effect, or the prestige, and this is the product of magic. If a rabbit is pulled from a hat, the rabbit, which apparently did not exist before the trick was performed, can be said to be the prestige of that trick. — Christopher Priest

The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible? — Jeff VanderMeer

Is the goal I've set been determined by a desire to avoid the goal I should have set? — Craig D. Lounsbrough

I realised how much misdirection is in stunt co-coordinating. It's similar to magic, the tricks we use to make people think the stunt is real. I also have a lifelong fascination with gambling cheats. I'm not one, but I do have a fascination with it. — Steve Truglia

What you call passion is not a spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world. Where passion dominates, that does not signify the presence of greater desire and ambition, but rather the misdirection of these qualities toward and isolated and false goal, with a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. Those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the flame of their fervor cannot always be seen. In argument, for example, they will not shout or wave their arms. But, I assure you, they are nevertheless, burning with subdued fires. — Hermann Hesse

There I am in my younger days, star gazing
Painting picture perfect maps
Of how my life and love would be
Not counting the unmarked paths of misdirection
My compass, faith in love's perfection
I missed ten million miles I should have seen. — Indigo Girls

Conversing with children is a fine art ... An art form that demands large amounts of both honesty and misdirection. Or maybe discretion is a better word. — Miriam Toews

Misdirection only comes from someone that has lost their way. — Shannon L. Alder

Tyranny happens when a society turns against itself, with one part usurping the power of [the] whole and applying it to the exploitation of the rest. Corruption, or misdirection of public effort for private gain, is one common feature of tyranny.... Government through fear is another common feature of tyranny, since it it through fear that one part of society can induce the other to betray its own interests. — Matthew Stewart

To merely blank the page and assume that 'religion' is the cause of all the world's problems is, on the contrary, an allegation brought about by nothing more than cognitive lethargy; it is when unburied and exposed but a stale conclusion and a misdirection of the one overwhelmed by centuries of sound theology, scholarly thought, and spiritual development. — Criss Jami

Without the errors, wrong turns and blind alleys, without the doubling back and misdirection and fumbling and chance discoveries, there was not one bit of joy in walking the labyrinth. — William Least Heat-Moon

The greater the intellect, the more ease in its misdirection. — David Mamet

To combat depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection
a procedure which can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

Reggie was so sick of it all. The things people knew (or thought they knew) about other people. Maybe everyone had a secret life, not just Vera. She suddenly hated all of it. She wanted people to be as see-through as fish tanks, no more murkiness, no misdirection. No lies and bullshit. No secret rooms or lies about being the star of some goddamn play that didn't even exist. — Jennifer McMahon

There is ten times more in the world than would maintain all in yet unknown luxury. Yet how much misery there is in our midst; not because there is not enough, but owing to the misdirection of it. — Ernestine Rose

When you've managed to stumble directly into the heart of the unknown - either through the misdirection of others, or better yet, through your own creative ineptitude - there is no one there to hold your hand or tell you what to do. In those bad lost moments, in the times when are advised not to panic, we own the unknown, and the world belongs to us. The child within has full reign. Few of us are ever so free — Tim Cahill

Misdirection is one of my strengths, — Erin Morgenstern

I will cut taxes - cut taxes - for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class. — Barack Obama

The mass media causes sexual misdirection: It prompts us to need something deeper than what we want. This is why Woody Allen has made nebbish guys cool; he makes people assume there is something profound about having a relationship based on witty conversation and intellectual discourse. There isn't. It's just another gimmick, and it's no different than wanting to be with someone because they're thin or rich or the former lead singer of Whiskeytown. — Chuck Klosterman

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable. — Hypatia

Film and theater are about misdirection and making the audience see something. I find it interesting. One of the things we do in 'True Blood' is shoot all of our stunts in camera. Instead of doing some kind of visual effect, we try to make it happen. — Stephen Moyer

We know there are no weapons of mass destruction. But there are weapons of misdirection. Millions without health insurance, poverty abounds. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor. — Joseph Lowery

If truth is relative, then it's cousin is anarchy. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Of course, to avoid getting stuck in that convo with someone you dislike or feel uncomfortable around, don't be passive, be proactive. Do not let them direct your interaction on their terms, do it on yours. Ask a Misdirection Question
something too difficult to answer quickly
e.g., 'What's Congress up to?' or 'You ever learn any cool science?' When you ask the question, don't make eye contact, keep moving and get out of there. Do not wait for a response and deny ever asking it. Repeat these actions until you are never again spoken to by that individual (about four times). — Eugene Mirman

We're a different sort of thief here, Lamora. Deception and misdirection are our tools. We don't believe in hard work when a false face and a good line of bullshit can do so much more. — Scott Lynch

It was like magic, but so much of magic is about misdirection, whereas so much of redemption is straightforward and ordinary, piercing true and lit with surprise. — Geoffrey Wood

But the old traditions of sectarian misdirection still in spite of a certain advance in technical efficiency, cripple and distort the general mind. "All that has been changed," cry indignant teachers under criticism. But the evidence that this teaching of theirs still fails to produce a public that is alert, critical, and capable of vigorous readjustment in the face of overwhelming danger, is to be seen in the newspapers that satisfy the Tewler public, the arguments and slogans that appeal to it, the advertisements that succeed with it, the stuff it swallows. It is a press written by Homo Tewler for Homo Tewler all up and down the scale. The Times Tewler, the Daily Mail Tewler, the Herald, the Tribune, the Daily Worker; there is no difference except a difference in scale and social atmosphere. Through them all ran the characteristic Tewler streak of willful ignorance, deliberate disingenuousness, and self-protective illusion. — H.G.Wells

Charley wondered how it happened that men of the cloth always seemed to misunderstand the ways of the Lord. If you wanted protection you had to ask for money or love, and He would give you protection instead. Prayer was a study in misdirection... — Pete Dexter

A small bad intention is often far more easily believed than a big one, Magnificence — Raymond E. Feist

Magic consists of creating, by misdirection of the senses, the mental impression of supernatural agency at work. That, and only that, is what modern magic really is, and that meaning alone is now assignable to the term. — John Nevil Maskelyne

Superstition is not, as has been defined, an excess of religious feeling, but a misdirection of it, an exhausting of it on vanities of man's devising. — Richard Whately

This whole illusion has its history in ways of thinking - in the images, models, myths, and language systems which we have used for thousands of years to make sense of the world. These have had an effect on our perceptions which seems to be strictly hypnotic. It is largely by talking that a hypnotist produces illusions and strange behavioral changes in his subjects - talking coupled with relaxed fixation of the subject's conscious attention. The stage magician, too, performs most of his illusions by patter and misdirection of attention. Hypnotic illusions can be vividly sensuous and real to the subject, even after he has come out of the so-called "hypnotic trance." It is, then, as if the human race had hypnotized or talked itself into the hoax of egocentricity. There is no one to blame but ourselves. — Alan W. Watts