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Playing Cards Quotes

Browse 55 quotes about Playing Cards.

Playing Cards Quotes

“Performing magic in the live show thrills me. Just get me a deck of cards and some attentive audience, and I have made my day and theirs too”

“A magician may step out without a purse, but he should never step out without a pack of playing cards.”

“The bunk was a long, rectangular building. Inside, the walls were whitewashed and the floor unpainted. In three walls there were small, square windows, and in the fourth a solid door with a wooden latch. Against the walls were eight bunks, five of them made up with blankets and the other three showing their burlap ticking. Over each bunk there was nailed an apple-box with the opening forward so that it made two shelves for the personal belongings of the occupant of the bunk. And these shelves were loaded with little articles, soap and talcum-powder, razors and those Western magazines ranch-men love to read and scoff at and secretly believe. And there were medicines on the shelves, and little vials, combs; and, from nails on the box-sides, a few neck-ties. Near one wall there was a black cast-iron stove, its stove-pipe going straight up through the ceiling. In the middle of the room stood a big square table littered with playing-cards, and around it were grouped boxes for the players to sit on.”

“He told them he regretted that he had missed an early opportunity to invest in Nintendo in the 1970's. "They were just a playing-card company," Watanabe-san said, with a self-deprecating laugh. "Hanafuda. For aunties and little children, you know?" Nintendo's most successful product before they made Donkey Kong was, indeed, a deck of hanafuda playing cards. "What's hanafuda?" Sam asked. "Plastic cards. Quite small and thick, with flowers and scenes of nature," Watanabe-san said. "Oh!" Sam said. "I know these! I used to play them with my grandmother, but we didn't call them hanafuda. I think the game we played was called Stop-Go?" "Yes," Watanabe-san said. "In Japan, the game most people play with hanafuda is called Koi Koi, which means..." "Come come," Marx filled in.”

“For all its modern glamour and for everything else that the Tarot has become, it had a fairly humble origin; it began as a simple pack of playing cards. No matter what use the Tarot is put to today, from psychological insight to divination to collectible folk art, it began and remains a card game. Trying to understand the Tarot without knowledge of this fact would be like trying to perform surgery without any knowledge of anatomy. In both cases, we end up with a mangled product.”

“Flower’s evidentiary gymnastics beautifully illustrate the primary point I wish to make, which is that almost all of the Tarot’s acquired meaning has been derived from a foundation that has been shown to be lacking in both substance and truth. Furthermore, this pseudo-history has been promulgated ad infinitum from the late 18th century to the present day.”

“Although Etteilla receives little credit in popular literature today, he can credited with many ‘firsts’': he was certainly the first to popularise fortune-telling with playing cards , the first to promote card reading as a professional activity and the first to publish books on the subject. He also was the first to use a pseudonym as a constant pen-name, initiating a tradition which was to flourish among XIX-oentury esoteric writers, as the following chapters will abundantly demonstrate. Thanks to Etteilla, Court de Gébelin's theory about the 'Egyptian' origin of the Tarot had a wider diffusion and fortune-telling with Tarot cards became popular. He was the first. too, to attempt to incorporate Tarot cards into a system of magical theory: his example, though not his means of doing so, was to be followed by others whose infuence has persisted longer. Last but not least, he can be credited too with the invention of the very word cartomancie, or rather of its forerunner, ‘cartonomancie', which appeared in his writings from 1782. Amazingly, one of his disciples was about to publish a book on 'cartomancie' in 1789 (the first occurrence of such a word in a European language), but as the book is now lost we only know it from Etteilla's very critical review, rejecting this quite new and ‘illogical’ word to which he opposed his ‘better’ cartonomancie. Nevertheless, cartomancie took hold and its use spread. In 1803, it entered de Wailly’s French dictionary, and from these it has found its way into alnost all European languages, Jean-Baptiste Alliette died on 12 December 1791. He was only 53, which is, even in the XVIII century, a rather young age at which to die, We unfortunately know nothing of what he died of. Etteilla was a fascinating character and deserves more than giving his name to a strange Tarot pack. There is something touching in the man, who was sincere and passionate, generous and enlightened (in all the meanings of the word in the late XVIII century.”

“This passage, taken from Thomas Williams's doctoral thesis for the University of Alabama, very well illustrates what, sociologically regarded, Is the most interesting fact about the Tarot pack, namely that it is the subject of the most successful propaganda campaign ever launched, not by a very long way the most important, but the most completely successful. An entire false history, and false interpretation, of the Tarot pack was concocted by the occultists; and it is all but universally believed. For instance, save in so far as it is safeguarded by qualifications (themselves dubious) like ‘the majority view among occultists is that...’,every sentence in the foregoing quotation is untrue.”

“While you're playing cards with a regular guy or having a bite to eat with him, he seems a peaceable, good-humoured and not entirely dense person. But just begin a conversation with him about something inedible, politics or science, for instance, and he ends up in a deadend or starts in on such an obtuse and base philosophy that you can only wave your hand and leave.”

“It is far best for the Christian never to see some things, so he will never want them. The old-fashioned Christian who will not have playing cards in his house will never learn to gamble with them. One who never sees, in movies and night clubs or elsewhere, half-clothed girls, drinking, smoking, gambling, petting, making love to many men, is likely to miss being led into that kind of life by these sirens of sin. It is the Devil's game to make people think it necessary for people to "know the ways of the world.”

“So, Im thinking of a name for a villain that has a sense of humor. I thought of The Joker as a name, and as soon as I thought that, I associate it with the playing card, as my family had a tradition of champion playing; my brother was a contract champion bridge player. There were always cards around the house.”

“Hi, this is Bernard Fanning from Powderfinger. I'm in New York at the moment, and we've been walking around the city, it's pretty strange. I was walking along with Darren and Cogsy yesterday and we saw this guy playing cards, a little two up type swindle, and he ripped this guy off for like one hundred bucks in like, ten seconds, and the guy started complaining so he just packed up his shop and left! And it was the smoothest swindle any of us had ever seen. So that was probably the highlight of our trip here so far.”

“When the prisoner is brought down from Death Row he steps from the elevator directly into a "holding" room that adjoins the witness room. There are two cells in this "holding" room, two, in case it's a double execution. They're ordinary cells, just like this one, and the prisoner spends his last night there before his execu­tion in the morning, reading, listening to the radio, playing cards with the guards.”

“I have gone up in the Pyramids and the stones are so close together you can't force a playing card between them and (they are) in perfect alignment. So those people must have had some hydraulics or something. You take 20 men, put them around a big stone, their legs would get in the way. Even if they could lift it, 20 pairs of legs hitting against each other would throw it off balance. And they would not have it in exact alignment. Not even a fraction of an inch off.”

“I go to a hotel and try to get there by 5:30 in the morning. I keep a dictionary, a thesaurus, a bible, a deck of playing cards, a bottle of sherry, and stacks of yellow sticky pads. I shut myself in for six, seven hours. I have an arrangement with the hotel that no one may go in my room. After three or four months, they might slip notes under my door like, "Dear Ms. Angelou, please let us change the linens. We think they might be molding." It's probably true. I let them in if they promise not to touch anything other then the bed.”

“Imagine that Queen Elizabeth I, in her time, had the opportunity to give out a monopoly for playing cards within the kingdom. She knew she was going to give it to one of her courtiers. These courtiers would then all try to curry her favour. Meanwhile, they would not contribute anything to the product of the kingdom, in fact, they were wasting resources trying to secure a single prize. That, more or less, is rent seeking.”

“Any time women come together with a collective intention, it's a powerful thing. Whether it's sitting down making a quilt, in a kitchen preparing a meal, in a club reading the same book, or around the table playing cards, or planning a birthday party, when women come together with a collective intention, magic happens.”

“Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well.”

“The Violins waltzed. The Cellos and Basses provided accompaniment. The Violas mourned their fate, while the Concertmaster showed off. The Flutes did bird imitations…repeatedly, and the reed instruments had the good taste to admire my jacket. The Trumpets held a parade in honor of our great nation, while the French Horns waxed nostalgic about something or other. The Trombones had too much to drink. The Percussion beat the band, and the Tuba stayed home playing cards with his landlady, the Harp, taking sips of warm milk a blue little cup. “But the Composer is still dead.”

“Day and night she had drudged and struggled and thrown her soul into her work, and there was not much of her left over for anything else. Being human, she suffered from this lack and did what she could to make up for it. If she passed the evening bent over a table in the library and later declared that she had spent that time playing cards, it was as though she had managed to do both those things. Through the lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life.”