"Hocus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... 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 Turks ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... Interchange — N. interchange, exchange; commutation, permutation, intermutation; reciprocation, transposition, rearrangement; shuffling; alternation, reciprocity; castling (at chess); hocus-pocus. interchangeableness^, interchangeability. recombination; combination &c 48. barter &c 794; tit for tat &c (retaliation) 718; cross fire, battledore and shuttlecock; quid pro quo. V. interchange, exchange, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... submissive or rebellious, she would have behind her the marriage tradition of our general history. This tradition relates the woman to the man. He goes on with his business, and she adapts herself to him and to it. Even in citizenship, by some strange hocus-pocus, that fact of birth and geography was waved aside, and the woman automatically acquired ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... 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 ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... found it in me to laugh at the whole miserable hocus-pocus, had I been less indignant. The situation was, besides, sufficiently grave; and as I listened to this silly and profane juggling, and observed the wildness of my grandfather's bearing, it became plain to me ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... expression on Eleanore's face 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 Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... once a Greek asked I would fain ask too, Who knows if all the Spectacle be true, Or an illusion of the gods [the Will, To wit] some hocus-pocus to fulfil? ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... had expected, Mrs. Sutton in the height of business, directing the setting of the breakfast-table, clearing away the debris of the evening feast, and counting the silver with unusual care, lest a stray fork or spoon had, by some hocus-pocus known to the class, been slipped into the ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... 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 gentle ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... a conviction. Now it needed not repetition, for it forced itself upon his consciousness, and he seemed to KNOW, even before the jury retired to consult, that by some trick, some negligence, some miserable hocus-pocus, the murderer of his child, his darling, his Absalom, who had never rebelled—the slayer of his unburied boy would slip through the fangs of justice, and walk free and unscathed over that earth where his son would never ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... highway may, heretofore, have been not particularly clean, choked with rubbish, badly drained, ill lighted, not always well paved even with good intentions, and beset with dangerous characters, bilious-looking Thugs, prowling about, ready to pounce upon, hocus, strangle, and pillage any new arrival. But all that is now changed. Now, the path of literature is all velvet and roses. The race of quacks and impostors has become as extinct, as are the saurian and the dodo; and every honest flourisher ...
— The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil • Edward G. Flight
... 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 chaunted. Then three times laid upon his head A shovelful of church-yard 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 ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... worst Anscombe stood to lose nothing, I shrugged my shoulders and held my tongue. It was Marnham's deal, and although he was somewhat in the shadow of the hanging lamp and the candles had guttered out, I distinctly saw him play some hocus-pocus with the cards, but in the circumstances made no protest. As it chanced he must have hocus-pocused them wrong, for though his hand was full of trumps, Rodd held nothing at all. The battle that ensued was quite exciting, but ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 had made ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... that was a brave eater of pottage, and reigned in the time of the flood; Who begat Nembroth, Who begat Atlas, that with his shoulders kept the sky from falling; Who begat Goliah, Who begat Erix, that invented the hocus pocus plays of legerdemain; Who begat Titius, Who begat Eryon, Who begat Polyphemus, Who begat Cacus, Who begat Etion, the first man that ever had the pox, for not drinking fresh in summer, as Bartachin witnesseth; Who begat Enceladus, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... to see any necessity for all this secrecy and hocus-pocus," District Attorney Sanderson protested irritably. "Why the devil don't you come clean and give us the low-down—if you have it!—on this miserable business, instead, of high-handedly summoning Captain Strawn to my office, so ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... do," Hopalong muttered, forcing the article mentioned into his holster. "Why, they're quite hocus-pocus. You take ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... when he had urged Malvina to test her strength, so to express it, on the unfortunate Mrs. Arlington, it was with the conviction that the result would restore him to his mental equilibrium. That Malvina with a wave of her wand—or whatever the hocus-pocus may have been—would be able to transform the hitherto incorrigibly indolent and easy-going Mrs. Arlington into a sort of feminine Lloyd George, had not really entered into ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... instrument of a majority of 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 Constitution which has been made ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... blasted," said Jonas Billings from the crowd. "Chinese dukes, eh! What's it all about?" "Reg'lar hocus-pocus," remarked the vagabond ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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 scenes with nankeen trowsers, a blue coat out at the elbows, ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... believe they see these things. This is practically the suggestion of a wise Mohammedan, who is quoted by Yule as saying, "Wallah! 'tis my opinion there has been neither going up nor coming down; 'tis all hocus-pocus," hocus-pocus being presumably ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... life to the last drop, with all the horrors and delights that may lie hidden at the bottom of it. Just as it is our evident duty every day to commit every good deed and every rascality lying within our capacity.... No, I won't let you rob me of my death moments by any kind of hocus-pocus. It would imply a small-minded attitude, worthy neither of yourself nor of me.—Well, Felix, the twenty-sixth of November then! That's still seven weeks off. In regard to any formalities that may be required, you need have ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... aware that these things are but trifles to the Theosophists and Esoteric Buddhists, who profess to project their astral bodies, and play many other hocus pocus tricks of transmitting voices and articles to immense distances. They may therefore be able to explain these phenomena, I cannot; still I have the belief that there is some spirit-force which can and does ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... want things explained, any more'n Abe here! You prefer hocus-pocus. And nothin' will teach you. Take Rhody! Sees Michaelis flunk his job miserable. Sees Mary go down like a woman shot, hands and legs paralyzed again,—Doctor says, for good, this time. And what does the girl do about it? Spends the ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... admired. He was ambitious that it should be said of him that he was far-and-away the cleverest of his party. He knew himself to be clever. But he could only be far-and-away the cleverest by saying and doing that which no one could understand. If he could become master of some great hocus-pocus system which could be made to be graceful to the ears and eyes of many, which might for awhile seem to have within it some semi-divine attribute, which should have all but divine power of mastering the loaves and fishes, then would they who followed him believe in him more ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... 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
... suspected the Papisher of having had a hand in the whole of that black and midnight business, in which the stocks had been broken, bunged up, and consigned to perdition, and that the Papisher had the evil reputation of dabbling in the Black Art, the hocus-pocus way in which the Lenny he had incarcerated was transformed into the doctor he found, conjoined with the peculiarly strange eldrich and Mephistophelean physiognomy and person of Riccabocca, could not but strike ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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
... this money—perhaps even so large, a fraction as one half. It may be that, ere now, some obliging person about the City Hall has offered to buy the claim for a thousand dollars, and take the risk of the hocus-pocus necessary for getting it—which to him is no ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... 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 ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... 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 ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... invention, a more or less original one, I am ready to admit, but an invention of not the least practical interest. Just an invention of the detectives, this Fantomas; or, it may be of the journalists only, who have made the gaping public swallow this hocus-pocus pill—this enormous pill!" The lieutenant stared at Fandor defiantly. "And let me add, I speak from knowledge, for, up to a certain point, I know ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... and quack Destruction; Or roar like Marshal, that Geneva Bull, Hell and Damnation a Pulpit full: Yet to express a Scot, to play that Prize, Not all those Mouth-Granadoes can suffice. Before a Scot can properly be curst, I must, like Hocus, swallow Daggers first. Scots are like Witches; do but whet your Pen, Scratch till the Blood comes, they'll ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid
... earth is mud. Diamonds and rubies are just nowhere by comparison. I don't mean weight for weight, of course—mud is 'cheap as dirt,' to buy in small quantities—but aggregate for aggregate. Quite literally, and without hocus-pocus of any sort, the money valuation of the mud in the world must outnumber many thousand times the money valuation of all the other minerals put together. Only we reckon it usually not by the ton, but by the acre, though the acre is worth most where the ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... what I call Hocus Pocus work!" said Mr Hobson; "but I shall make free to ask the chairmen ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... witch-charms they use, the incantations, cutting of flesh, fire-oblations, meaningless formulae, united with sacrosanct expressions of the church, are all on a par with the religion of the lower classes as depicted in Theocritus and the Atharvan. If these mummeries and this hocus-pocus were collected into a volume, and set out with elegant extracts from the Bible, there would be a nineteenth century Atharva Veda. What are the necessary equipment of a Long Island witch? First, "a good hot fire," and ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... do," Beatrice went on. "This Bentwood is a doctor who is an expert in the miracles and the hocus pocus of the East. The drug they administered to you is not known in England; the thing has never been seen here. I understand that they could have kept you in a state of suspended animation as long as they pleased. But they desired ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... any nonsense of that sort, do you? There's nothing in the least mystical in the kind of sympathy that exists between Cyril and myself. It's all purely physical. We're very like one another. But that's all. There's none of the Corsican Brothers sort of hocus-pocus about us in any way. The whole thing is a simple caste of ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... him, I found accidentally in a pamphlet on Quackery, published in 1805, at Kingston-upon-Hull. In a note to that little work, I am informed that Dr. Katerfelto practised on the people of London in the influenza of 1782; that he added to his nostrum the fascinations of hocus pocus; and that among other philosophical apparatus, he employed the services of some extraordinary black cats, with which he astonished the ignorant, and confounded the vulgar. But he was not, it seems, so successful in his practice ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pardon it is clear That nothing's here and nothing's there: I think our States do mean to choke us With this new Act of HOCUS POCUS. ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... 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 ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... A certain hocus-pocus concerning character reading, a perverted revival of the ancient phrenology and physiognomy, has invaded the employment territory in America as the newest charlatanism. The study of the internal secretions, including blood and X-ray examinations, will surely assist the demand for a truly ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... host pursued, "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 countenance was ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... changes on the balance of power, the Protestant religion, and your allies on the continent; acting like the juggler, who picks your pockets while he dazzles your eyes and amuses your fancy with twirling his fingers and reciting the gibberish of hocus pocus; for, in fact, the balance of power is a mere chimera. As for the Protestant religion, nobody gives himself any trouble about it; and allies on the continent, we have none, or, at least, none that would raise an hundred men to save us from perdition, unless ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... the oddest. A Georgian woman's skull was the handsomest in his collection. Hence it became his model exemplar of human skulls, from which all others might be regarded as deviations; and out of this, by some strange intellectual hocus-pocus, grew up the notion that the Caucasian man is the prototypic "Adamic" man, and his country the primitive centre of our kind. Perhaps the most curious thing of all is, that the said Georgian skull, after all, is not a skull of average form, but distinctly ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... women—and I 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
... source of the sound now. It came from inside the black walls of Layroh's tent, pitched there in its usual isolation on a slight rise fifty yards from the sleeping group. Foster grunted disgustedly to himself. More of Layroh's scientific hocus-pocus! The man seemed to go out of his way to add new phases of mystery to this crazy expedition of his through the ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... everywhere in the utmost confusion; and, by the way, they have never been able to find the balance since that time, and all the fine speeches upon the subject, with which your newspapers are every now and then filled, are all mere hocus-pocus and rhodomontade. However, the caldron was soon set on, and the air was darkened by witches riding on broomsticks, bringing a couple of folios under each arm, and across each shoulder. I remember the time exactly: it was just as the council ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... 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 ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... "As to all this hocus-pocus about the ha'nt, that is easily explained. He needed a scapegoat on whom to turn the blame when the bonds should disappear; so he and this Cat-Eye Mose between them invented a ghost. The ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... old woman, and afraid of the ship's losing reputation while he was in charge, told them all to be good boys and he would speak to the Captain when he came aboard; and served them out three fingers of rum apiece, which the bo'sun took upon himself to hocus. By latest accounts, they're sleeping it off and—I say, waiter, you might tell the cook ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... me to Bodmin Fair to-morrow for a treat, an' see the Great Turk and the Fat 'Ooman and hocus-pocus. So tell me more 'bout Joan ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... metal in order to record their own deeds." The Changes are quoted in history often enough by statesmen, as well as the Odes and the Book; but, even if the First August Emperor did not entertain the suspicion that the first were (as, indeed, they are according to our Western lights) all "hocus-pocus," he was himself very credulous and superstitious, and the learned word-juggling of the Changes was in any case harmless to him; so that really his rage was confined to the four or five books, known by heart throughout ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... I thy satire's darts To gie the rascals their deserts, I'd rip their rotten, hollow hearts, An' tell aloud Their jugglin' hocus-pocus arts To cheat ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... in their hearts as angry as were their opponents. What was to be gained but the poor interval of three months? There were clever men who suggested that Mr. Daubeny had a scheme in his head—some sharp trick of political conjuring, some "hocus-pocus presto" sleight of hand, by which he might be able to retain power, let the elections go as they would. But, if so, he certainly did not make his scheme ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... accompanied that gentleman to his home, whilst Mr. Tupman, Mr. Snodgrass and Sam repaired to the "Peacock." They all first dined together at the "Town Arms" and arranged to reassemble there in the morning. It was here the barmaid was reported to have been bribed to "hocus the brandy and water of fourteen unpolled electors as was a stopping in the house," and where most of the exciting scenes of the election either took place, or had ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... he said, "Tails, go." He opened his hand, and looked at the coin. "Heads! Very good. Go on with your hocus-pocus, Doctor—I'll wait." ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... Rufus. His voice was shaky, and if there had been light enough to see it, his face was gray with terror of his own hocus-pocus. The cat's head had dropped out of the line of sunlight, and she had coiled herself up on the dresser among a disorderly litter of crockery ware. Dick, relieved from the fascination of her too-visible presence, obeyed the summons, and Rufus, seating himself upon a broken ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... those big, glaring diamond things are fit for! Mr. Holmes told me he had replaced all the shoes that disappeared last night, as he took them for the purpose of finding out where the stolen cuff-buttons were by his peculiar hocus-pocus methods, so you can't accuse me of having taken them too. I found my pair of shoes in a corner of my room when I returned there after breakfast. Now will you forgive me? Billie Budd is gone, so I don't suppose there will be ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... phantasms, could serve you in anything. What the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible,—that, in God's name, leave uncredited; at your peril do not try believing that. No subtlest hocus-pocus of "reason" versus "understanding" will avail for that feat;—and it is terribly perilous to try ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... suppose all this hocus-pocus is going to do us?" muttered Harry irritably, "as if an old fire could tell us anything we didn't know already. It's ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... "you listen to this: 'Pers'nally appeared before me this fifteenth day of September Charles Gammon, of Smyrna, and deposes and declares that by divers arts, charms, spells, and magic, incantations, and evil hocus-pocus, one—one—'" ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... by experience, that one would 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
... is almost needless to point out, are much more cautious about embracing the conventional hocus-pocus of the situation. They never acknowledge that they have fallen in love, as the phrase is, until the man has formally avowed the delusion, and so cut off his retreat; to do otherwise would be to bring down upon their heads the mocking and contumely of ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... are separated. In other words, the intermediaries which in their concrete particularity form a bridge, evaporate ideally into an empty interval to cross, and then, the relation of the end-terms having become saltatory, the whole hocus-pocus of Erkenntnistheorie begins, and goes on unrestrained by further concrete considerations. The idea, in 'meaning' an object separated by an 'epistemological chasm' from itself, now executes what Professor Ladd calls a 'salto mortale'; in knowing the object's nature, ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... turned upon a mere matter of territorial or commercial controversy, which a peace might settle by the imposition or the taking off a duty, with the gain or the loss of a remote island or a frontier town or two, on the one side or the other. This shifting of persons could not be done without the hocus-pocus of abstraction. We have been in a grievous error: we thought that we had been at war with rebels against the lawful government, but that we were friends and allies of what is properly France, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... unvarnished defence than a truckling and time-serving judge might do. And, indeed, in a time when justice is, in all its branches, so completely corrupted, I would rather lose my life by open military violence, than be conjured out of it by the hocus-pocus of some arbitrary lawyer, who lends the knowledge he has of the statutes made for our protection, to ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... anxious to meet Acton, for Phil, in the holidays, had given Jack a pretty correct inkling of Acton's character, and he began to see—in fact, he did see—that Raffles and the shooting and the billiards, and the hocus pocus of "hedging on Grape Shot," and the trip to London, etc., was only one involved, elaborate plot to strike at Phil. Jack now fully realized that he had played a very innocent fly to Acton's consummate spider, and he now, when there wasn't any very pressing necessity, determined to ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... queried: for I did not understand all this hocus-pocus of locating any given spot in the Iowa prairies in 1855. ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... right presentation of the floral part of Nature's great horticultural show. She alone is competent to say whether there is any available remedy for the stained breadth in Jane's dress,—whether the fatal spot by any magical hocus-pocus can be cut out from the fulness, or turned up and smothered from view in the gathers, or concealed by some new fashion of trimming falling with generous appropriateness exactly across the fatal weak point. She can tell you whether that remnant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... mule isn't going to move one step without that 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 ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... again! 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
... independence, that my loyalty may be 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 Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... 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 to ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... reconciling the conscience with the cowardice of the North, and the other conceding the arrogant pretensions of the South,—the negation of the power of the central government over Slavery was carried into effect. By a legislative hocus-pocus, known as the Compromise Measures of 1850, Congress, contrary to the uniform tendency of bodies entrusted with a discretion, vacated instead of enlarging its powers. Its sovereign function of territorial legislation was abdicated, in favor of that wretched and ragged ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... the same reasonable manner as we approach any other scientific discovery. There is no hocus-pocus about it, nor are any statements made here which experience cannot verify. But the attitude we should beware most of is that of the intellectual amateur, who makes the vital things of life small coin to exchange with his neighbour of the dinner-table. Like religion, autosuggestion is a thing ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... said Kantwise, "only this, you know, if I hocus you, why you hocus me in return; so it isn't ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... now. Who was this spick foreigner who ran hooting after her? It was not like Davidge to be either curious or suspicious. But love was beginning its usual hocus-pocus with character and turning a tired business man ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... little selves, while the other 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 ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... 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. When in the world ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... Baker is not a name to be ashamed of, and if you think that by any of your underhand hocus pocus you can trespass on my premises and prevent my caring for my own ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... like praestigiae may be in the toad. It might be a real toad (though actuated and guided by a daemon) which was cut in pieces, and that also which was whipt about, and at last snatcht out of sight (as if it had vanished) by these aerial hocus-pocus's. And if some juglers have tricks to take hot coals into their mouth without hurt, certainly it is not surprising that some small attempt did not suffice to burn that toad. That such a toad, sent by a witch and crawling up the body of the man of the house as he ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... Kerry in a high, strained voice. "Why seven-one-nine? And why all this hocus-pocus? Am I to understand, sir, that not only myself but all the Criminal Investigation Department ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... wouldna wonder but what that was the next best. But see to the pair of them! If I didna feel just sure of the lassie, and that she was awful pleased and chief with Alan, I would think there was some kind of hocus-pocus about yon." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... knew perfectly that it was not. This touch and go young Barnacle had 'got up' the Department in a private secretaryship, that he might be ready for any little bit of fat that came to hand; and he fully understood the Department to be a politico-diplomatic hocus pocus piece of machinery for the assistance of the nobs in keeping off the snobs. This dashing young Barnacle, in a word, was likely to become a statesman, and to ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... may 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
... despise drugs and to compel dieting and exercise. She had the tact which he 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 ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... the 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 begun,' priding yourself upon raising the shout ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... wise woman who sends the message? Methinks I have heard Rachel speak of her ere now. Well, I can but go visit her and hear what she would have to say. I know the house in Budge Row; I took Rachel to the door once. For myself, I love not such hocus pocus; but if it be a matter of Cuthbert's safety, I will e'en go and listen to her tale. If she wants to filch money from me for foul purposes, she will find she has come to the wrong man. I will pay for nothing till I ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... "Hocus-pocus Larifari!" cried Heinrich within, and gave the tankard to a half-grown fellow, of the age between boy ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... property or population, must have been fatal to the Whigs; they, therefore, very dexterously adopted a small minority of the nation, consisting of the sectarians, and inaugurating them as the people with a vast and bewildering train of hocus-pocus ceremonies, invested the Dissenters with political power. By this coup-d'etat they managed the House of Commons, and having at length obtained a position, they have from that moment laid siege to the House of Lords, with ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... various events of the war, with the accompanying political intrigues, are symbolized by the stages in the progress of the suit, the tricks of the lawyers, and the devices of the principal attorney, Humphrey Hocus (Marlborough), to prolong the struggle. His Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus—a satire on the abuses of human learning,—in which the type of the fictitious biography is adopted, ...
— English Satires • Various
... the darkeys who came into his grove of a Sunday had passes from their masters, it was all right; but there was something that was not all right, and it was the occasion of no little uneasiness and perplexity to Mr. Riley. By some hocus-pocus Toby had learned to read his Bible. There was nothing wrong in that, of course, but a darkey who could read his Bible would be likely to read papers as well; and from them, especially if they chanced to be Northern papers, he might imbibe ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon
... it and nearly got blood-poisonin'. The very first time I ever laid eyes on this man and his wife a great misfortune overtook me, and ever since they come to Jonesville I've had a close squeeze to make a live of it. This fellow Strange, with his fortune-tellin' and his charms and his conjures, has hocus-pocussed the whole neighborhood. He's gettin' rich off of the Mexicans. He knows more secrets than a priest; he tells 'em whether their sweethearts love 'em, whether a child is goin' to be a boy or a girl, and ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... 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
... My aunt began her hocus pocus by throwing out all the cards in the pack under seven. She shuffled the rest with her left hand for luck; and then she gave them to me to cut. "Wi' yer left hand, Francie. Mind that! Pet your trust in Proavidence—but dinna forget that your ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... I don't feel any animosity against them; I would much rather be fighting the French; but they, by a sort of hocus-pocus, are our allies," remarked Green. "In reality we are not making war on the Russian people; we are expressly ordered not to injure any of their property; our business is only to destroy ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... We should then never have sent some thirty men into a bye-street of London to distribute patronage and govern a great country. The Government of India would then have been made a department of the Government, with a Council and a Minister of State. But it appears that the old system of hocus- pocus is ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... the words on the roll, the roll that wasn't, as though they were engraved on his eye-retinas: As a beginning, and to prove this isn't just a bit of hocus-pocus, one of the people at your Center is due to leave for here any ...
— Warning from the Stars • Ron Cocking
... infallible remedy for colic, provided, first, it be found in the dung of a wolf, second, that it docs not touch the ground, and, third, that it is not touched by a woman.[45] Another cure for colic is effected by certain hocus-pocus with a scrap of wool from the forehead of a first-born lamb, if only the lamb, instead of being allowed to fall to the ground, has been caught by hand as it dropped from its dam.[46] In Andjra, a district of Morocco, the people attribute many magical ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... nonchalant while causing these marvels that they fail to convince. Why, when I was holding a slate in order that they might write upon it, I minded the scratching no more than a clock a-ticking, they had made me that careless of their hocus-pocus. A voice in my ear can't make me start, and nothing, absolutely nothing, can now 'rouse my fell of hair.' You put a potato in the ashes of the hearth and it will ultimately pop into something to eat. You put ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... bottomless pit; and in the bottomless pit shall all liars have their part, in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone." And again: "When all the praties were black in Ireland, why didn't the priests say the hocus-pocus over them, and make them all good again?" He shared, too, Mr. Murphy's fears of some invasion of his domestic happiness: "What I wish to say to you as Protestant husbands is, Take care of your wives!" And, finally, in the true vein of an Englishman doing as he likes, a vein of ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... 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
... model myself on my own father who dressed up as a shipmaster for my sake and swindled a slave-dealer out of a girl I was in love with. He felt no shame at going in for hocus-pocus at his time of life, and buying his son's affection, mine, by his kindnesses. These methods of my father's I have ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... had a bad case of rheumatism, and your physician came to your bedside and exclaimed loudly, "Hocus pocus, toutus talonteus, vade celeriter jubeo! You are cured." What would you think, what would you do, and what fee would you pay him? Probably, in spite of your aches and pangs, you would make astonishing speed—for a rheumatic person—in proffering him the entire room to himself. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... Tamasese's two or three hundred warriors at Mulinuu, as Becker himself owns, they had infringed the treaties, and Sewall entered protest twice. There were two ways of escaping this dilemma: one was to withdraw the warriors; the other, by some hocus-pocus, to abrogate the neutrality. And the second had subsidiary advantages: it would restore the taxes of the richest district in the islands to the Samoan king; and it would enable them to substitute over the royal seat the flag of Germany for the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... not have feared," he said with a tipsy grin, "but I had forgotten what I carry. I have a hocus-pocus here "—he touched his breast—"written by a wise man in Ravenna, and sealed with a dead Goth's hand, that is proof against devil or dam! And I ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... Doc, but they seemed to me a kind of hocus-pocus; and I don't believe any life-insurance company in the world would have issued me a policy on the ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... to which it professed to relegate him. As for me, my scepticism was to me robur et aes triplex. I disposed of the snake, put out the gas; and down we three sat, amid profound darkness, like three male witches in "Macbeth," having previously locked the door to prevent any one disturbing our hocus-pocus. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... he'd be to seek In all our Latin terms of art and Greek; Would never understand one word of sense The most irrefragable schoolman means: As if the Schools design'd their terms of art, Not to advance a science, but to divert; As Hocus Pocus conjures to amuse The rabble from observing ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... feminine mind," he pondered, "will be astounded, then I shall gain possession of her attention, and from trifles, from hocus-pocus, I shall pass on to that which will lead her to the centre of universal knowledge, where there is no superstition, no prejudices; where there is only a broad field ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... have no retainers but two, whose common names were Hocus and Pocus, but as he hated the use of common names and as no one had heard of Hocus' lineage (nor did he himself know it) he called him, Hocus, "Freedom" as being a high-sounding and moral name for a footman and Pocus (whose name was of an ordinary decent ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... cases. Lord de Mowbray renewed his acquaintance with a man who was successful; bowed to Hatton whenever they met; and finally consulted him respecting the barony of Valence which had been in the old Fitz-Warene and Mowbray families and to which it was thought the present earl might prefer some hocus-pocus claim through his deceased mother; so that however recent was his date as an English earl, he might figure on the roll as a Plantagenet baron, which in the course of another century would complete the grand mystification of high nobility. The ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... city in Illinois called St. Genevieve. By some hocus-pocus known to accomplished politicians, this city has had no Mayor since the 4th of June, 1867. In the absence of definite information upon the subject, we take it for granted that St. Genevieve must be a most delightful place to live in, and specially so, because, as we are further ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... and advancing a step toward the monk; peremptorily) Enough now! Stop your hocus-pocus. You have played your trick. Now stop, or I'll knock all that jugglery out of you. Do ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... the Brigade made of all this hocus-pocus I had no idea. Afterwards, when the adventure was over, I asked Mary, "Where in the world did you get that stuff?" And she told me how she had once acted in a children's comedy, in which there was an old magician who spent his time putting spells on people. She had had ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... in disgust at the cheap hocus-pocus of it—but the next moment a more violent emotion swept over him as he saw Diane seized and borne swiftly ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... attentively, and then remarked 'Unless one's thought pack more neatly in verse than in prose, it is wiser to refrain. Commonplace gains nothing by being translated into rhyme, for it is something which no hocus-pocus can transubstantiate with the real presence of living thought. You entitle your piece, "My Mother's Grave," and expend four pages of useful paper in detailing your emotions there. But, my dear sir, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... as far as possible. A warm at the sanctum's fire diminishes the purple in Miss Parkington's cheeks; and the maid, by some hocus-pocus peculiar to her craft, again inflates Miss Waters into a balloon, and stitches up Miss Brindle's flounces and "gathers." The ladies join their respective gentlemen, who have been cooling their toes and uttering warm ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... mounted volunteers under command of Colonel James W. Nesmith—subsequently for several years United States Senator from Oregon. The whole force was under the command of Major Rains, Fourth Infantry, who, in order that he might rank Nesmith, by some hocus-pocus had been made a brigadier-general, under an appointment from the Governor of ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... neck. The young man, blond and smooth faced, at the other side of the table and facing the light, was Doctor Stevens, a recently graduated pupil of the famous Schulze of Saint Christopher who as much as any other one man is responsible for the rejection of hocus-pocus and the injection of common sense into American medicine. For upwards of an hour young Stevens, coat off and shirt sleeves rolled to his shoulders, had been toiling with the lifeless form on the table. He had tried everything his training, his reading and his experience suggested—all ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... nothing, there being authentic cases where 'sober, hard-working miners toiled for years, or even a lifetime, without having been able to draw a single dollar, or but few dollars in actual cash,' in 'debt until the day they died;' refuse to fix the wages in advance, but pay them upon some hocus-pocus sliding-scale, varying with the selling price in New York, which the railway slides to suit itself; and most extraordinary of all, refuse to let the miners know the prices on which their living slides, a 'fraud,'" ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... counting-house to laboratory, and studied Sanscrit for recreation, moriturus te saluto. And thou, too, Markus, with thy boy's body, and thy old man's look, and thy encyclopaedic, inorganic mind; and thou, O Gans, with thy too organic Hegelian hocus-pocus. Yes, the Rabbis were right, and the baptismal font had us at last; but surely God counts the will to do, and is more pleased with great-hearted dreams than with the deeds of the white-hearted burghers ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... lost state of the dead, from the lurid Mangaian legend, in which infernal deities hocus and destroy the souls of all, to the various submarine and aerial limbos where the dead feast, float idle, or resume the occupations of their life on earth, it would be wearisome to tell. One story I give, for it is singular in itself, is well-known in Tahiti, and has this ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to make him work on sheers, or some hocus-pocusin' arrangement, an' he can't afford to hev him git sick. That's what his ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... Archdeacon is not at his ease. He cannot respect the little ginger-bread gods of doctrine they make for themselves; he cannot worship at their hill altars; their hocus-pocus and their crystallised phraseology fall dissonantly on his ear; their talk of chasubles and stoles, eastern attitude, and all the rest of it, is to him as a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. He would like to see the clergy merely scholars and men ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... hocus-pocus, kneeling down beside Anicza on the steps of the altar, and raising his eyes towards the black vault of the cavern as he recited the words of a new oath, which kept all the listeners spellbound, so ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... of their being paid, notwithstanding importuners had frequently intimated that a place called the gaol was not far distant, and that the squire's office was within a stone's throw of "the corner." Colonel M'Carstrow, reports say, had some years ago got a deal of money by an unexplainable hocus pocus, but it was well nigh gone in gambling, and now he was keeping brothel society and rioting away his life faster than the race-horses he had formerly kept on ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... 710 Like Charity; else right and wrong Could never hold it out so long, And, like blind Fortune, with a slight Convey mens' interest and right From Stiles's pocket into Nokes's, 715 As easily as Hocus Pocus; Play fast and loose; make men obnoxious, And clear again, like Hiccius Doctius. Then whether you wou'd take her life, Or but recover her for your wife, 720 Or be content with what she has, And let all ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... 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 different meanings for the same word in the same verse; and should ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... thought. "By some hocus-pocus, Miss Rose has made his acquaintance during those three weeks, and helped the slow time to pass. He did not tell her he was her sister's lover, hence the present frigidity. The long morning rides are accounted for now. I wonder"—he looked at pretty Rose—"I ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... illusions that they are regularly installed at court as purveyors of amusement. The first demand that is made on them is that they produce, for the entertainment of the court, the shades of the supremely beautiful Paris and Helena. To this end Mephistopheles devises the elaborate hocus-pocus of the Mothers. He sends Faust away to the vasty and viewless realm of the Ideal, instructing him how to bring thence a certain wonderful tripod, from the incense of which the desired forms can be made to appear. The show proceeds successfully, so far as the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... 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 ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... coast in a campaign, and no one would ever interfere to disturb us. Why should they? The Turks could not, and the natives of Fran-guestan would not. Leave me to manage them. There is nothing in the world I so revel in as hocus-sing Guizot and Aberdeen. You never heard of Guizot and Aberdeen? They are the two Reis Effendis of the King of the French and the Queen of the English. I sent them an archbishop last year, one of my fellows, Archbishop Murad, who led them a pretty dance. They nearly made me King of the ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... of which we devoured more in three minutes than a million of maggots could have done in three weeks. After cheese comes nothing; then all we desired was a clear stage and no favour; accordingly everything was whipped away in a trice by so cleanly a conveyance, that no juggler by virtue of Hocus Pocus could have conjured away balls with more dexterity. All our empty plates and dishes were in an instant changed into full quarts of purple nectar and unsullied glasses. Then a bumper to the Queen led the van of our good wishes, another to the Church Established, a third left to the ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... to say!" cried Cerizet. "And so you have invented this little game of hocus-pocus because you hold in your fingers fifteen thousand francs ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... nothing on it, not even a mat. He laid a plain piece of wood on the floor and motioned us to be seated in front of it; so we squatted in a line with our backs to the door, King taking his place between the Mahatma and me. There was no hocus-pocus or flummery; the whole proceeding was as ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... "He was a magnificent specimen of manhood"—"Her golden head reached scarcely to his shoulder"—"She was a fairy creature—the tiniest of her sex." Thus we have mated, and yet expected that by some hocus pocus the boys would all "take after their father," and the girls, their mother. In his efforts to improve the breed of other animals, man has never tried to deliberately cross the large and small and expect to keep up ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... at this point to make a plea for the scientific imagination. He says the inventor-scientists have brought us the mystery of electricity, which is no hocus-pocus, but a special manifestation of the Immanent God within us and about us. He says the student in the laboratory brought us the X-ray, the wireless telegraph, the mystery of radium, the mystery of all the formerly unharnessed power of God which man is beginning to gather into ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... have always shown great indulgence and forbearance towards this plea: besides, before the time of re-election comes about, these inconvenient scruples may, in the din of new contests, be forgotten, or remembered only to be forgiven, and, by the hocus pocus of party, even metamorphosed into a recommendation. When, then, it is so easy to take shelter behind the ark of the constitution, ought we to enlarge the limits of this place of ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... its face value for the sake of the adventure," the tall youth replied. "But he's wise enough to know there may be a lot of hocus-pocus in ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield
... assurance that we were in no danger of being betrayed into any unseemly manifestations of religious fervour. We had not gathered together at that performance to abase ourselves with furious hosannas before any dark Creator of an untamed Universe, no Deity of freaks and miracles and sinister hocus-pocus; but to pay our duty to a highly respected Anglican First Cause—undemonstrative, gentlemanly and conscientious—whom, without loss of self-respect, we ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... but as every people regarded as a mass is easily impressed and full of criminal instincts, unreasonable violence, and fierce passion, there is nothing to be done but to keep the masses under by vague fears and such-like hocus-pocus. Therefore it is my opinion that it was not without good reason or by mere chance that the ancients imparted to the masses the notions of the gods and the underworld, but rather is it thoughtless and irrational when nowadays we ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... 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
... imperfect, it is because we do not know enough. Every other road, excepting this, the king's highway, heads into a bog. These Jews actually believed in miracles; they had no science, and thought they could regenerate the world by hocus-pocus. They ought to be suppressed by law, and, if necessary, put to death, for ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... perhaps ten pounds would do—- that, and a pint of wine. I have a bottle of inky-pinkie in my pocket. (Approaches Goloshan.) By the hocus-pocus and the magical touch of my little finger; heigh ho! start up, Jack, ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... longer, but eventually he resigned. "This proscriptive policy for opinion's sake will greatly accelerate and aggravate the decomposition of the Democratic party in this State," said the Tribune. "That process was begun long since, but certain soft-headed quacks had thought it possible, by some hocus pocus, to restore the old unity ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... in themselves, corresponding to the abnormal strength of their minds; but they 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 ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw |
