Harry Houdini Quotes

Magic is the sole science not accepted by scientists, because they can't understand it.

Penelope Bunce is a fierce magician, I’ve never minded saying it. She’s just escaped from handcuffs and a flaming car. She’s casting spells without her wand in a dead spot. Harry Houdini himself couldn’t top it.

I must fling myself down and writhe; I must strive with every piece of force I possess; I bruise and batter myself against the floor, the walls; I strain and sob and exhaust myself, and begin again, and exhaust myself again; but do I feel pain? Never. How can I feel pain? There is no place for it.

I'm tired of fighting, Dash. I guess this thing is going to get me.

Houdini, the magician who debunked magic, could not bear to see the great rationalist [Arthur Conan] Doyle enchanted by ghosts and frauds. And so he did what any friend would: He set out to prove spiritualism false and rob his friend Doyle of the only comforting fiction that was keeping him sane. It was the least he could do.

The possible, as it was presented in her Health textbook (a mathematical progression of dating, "career," marriage, and motherhood), did not interest Harriet. Of all the heroes on her list, the greatest of them all was Sherlock Holmes, and he wasn’t even a real person. Then there was Harry Houdini. He was the master of the impossible; more importantly, for Harriet, he was a master of escape. No prison in the world could hold him: he escaped from straitjackets, from locked trunks dropped in fast rivers and from coffins buried six feet underground. And how had he done it? He wasn’t afraid. Saint Joan had galloped out with the angels on her side but Houdini had mastered fear on his own. No divine aid for him; he’d taught himself the hard way how to beat back panic, the horror of suffocation and drowning and dark. Handcuffed in a locked trunk in the bottom of a river, he squandered not a heartbeat on being afraid, never buckled to the terror of the chains and the dark and the icy water; if he became lightheaded, for even a moment, if he fumbled at the breathless labor before him– somersaulting along a river-bed, head over heels– he would never come up from the water alive. A training program. This was Houdini’s secret.

I don’t believe it,” I muttered. “How on earth did he manage to get the padlocks back onto the can?” Thomas opened his mouth, but Mrs. Harvey silenced him with a look. “Not a word out of you, dear. Or I swear I’ll finish my story about poor Mr. Harvey and his underthings.

Mum, still to this day, says that growing up I seemed destined to be a mix of Robin Hood, Harry Houdini, John the Baptist, and an assassin. I took it as a great compliment.

Harry Houdini had a saying that came back to Ian now and again: For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who don’t, none will suffice.

It was on the steamer carrying him through the Golden Gate that he happened to reach down into the hole in the lining of the right pocket of his overcoat and discover the envelope that his brother had solemnly handed to him almost a month before. It contained a single piece of paper, which Thomas had hastily stuffed into it that morning as they all were leaving the house together for the last time, by way or in lieu of expressing the feelings of love, fear, and hopefulness that his brother's escape inspired. It was the drawing of Harry Houdini, taking a calm cup of tea in the middle of the sky, that Thimas had made in his notebook during his abortive career as a librettist. Josef studied it, feeling as he sailed toward freedom as if he weighed nothing at all, as if every precious burden had been lifted from him.

Please,’” Mephistopheles added. When Harry raised a dark brow, the ringmaster elaborated. “If you bid your assistant to do something, have the courtesy of using manners. And have a care about using ‘ain’t’—it’s atrocious and distracts from your skill.” “I ain’t worried about it,” he said. “You shouldn’t be, neither. Who else can do the stunts I pull off?” He exaggeratedly glanced around. “No one, that’s who.” “You might yank rainbow-colored unicorns from purple clouds and I’d be distracted by your horrible grammar.” Mephistopheles smiled. “If not for me, do it for the poor unicorns. Magical creatures deserve proper speech.

So You Want to Be Famous

If men did not try and get something for nothing they might often be able to retain that which they have.

What the eyes see and the ears hear the mind believes

Books were my hobby, even as a child,' he told me. 'I read about every book in Milkwaukee Public Library before I was 15...Some of the books I didn't understand- but I read them just the same. I believed, you see, that my life work would be teaching, so I wanted to learning everything I could about every possible subject.

Sir Arthur, I have devoted a lot of time and thought to this illusion ... I won’t tell you how it was done, but I can assure you it was pure trickery. I did it by perfectly normal means. I devised it to show you what can be done along these lines. Now, I beg of you, Sir Arthur, do not jump to the conclusion that certain things you see are necessarily “supernatural,” or the work of “spirits,” just because you cannot explain them....

Mr. Sturgess ran the classes with iron, ex-military discipline. We each had spots on the floor, denoting where we should stand rigidly to attention, awaiting our next task. And he pushed us hard. It felt like Mr. Sturgess had forgotten that we were only age six--but as kids, we loved it. It made us feel special. We would line up in rows beneath a metal bar, some seven feet off the ground, then one by one we would say: “Up, please, Mr. Sturgess,” and he would lift us up and leave us hanging, as he continued down the line. The rules were simple: you were not allowed to ask permission to drop off until the whole row was up and hanging, like dead pheasants in a game larder. And even then you had to request: “Down, please, Mr. Sturgess.” If you buckled and dropped off prematurely, you were sent back in shame to your spot. I found I loved these sessions and took great pride in determining to be the last man hanging. Mum would say that she couldn’t bear to watch as my little skinny body hung there, my face purple and contorted in blind determination to stick it out until the bitter end. One by one the other boys would drop off the bar, and I would be left hanging there, battling to endure until the point where even Mr. Sturgess would decide it was time to call it. I would then scuttle back to my mark, grinning from ear to ear. “Down, please, Mr. Sturgess,” became a family phrase for us, as an example of hard physical exercise, strict discipline, and foolhardy determination. All of which would serve me well in later military days. So my training was pretty well rounded. Climbing. Hanging. Escaping. I loved them all. Mum, still to this day, says that growing up I seemed destined to be a mix of Robin Hood, Harry Houdini, John the Baptist, and an assassin. I took it as a great compliment.

It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like The Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws. Harry Houdini had roamed the Palladiums and Hippodromes of the world encumbered by an entire cargo-hold of crates and boxes, stuffed with chains, iron hardware, brightly colored flats and hokum, animated all the while only by this same desire, never fulfilled: truly to escape, if only for one instant; to poke his head through the borders of this world, with its harsh physics, into the mysterious spirit world that lay beyond. The newspaper articles Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited "escapism" among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life.

The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something—one poor, dumb, powerful thing—exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws. Harry Houdini had roamed the Palladiums and Hippodromes of the world encumbered by an entire cargo-hold of crates and boxes, stuffed with chains, iron hardware, brightly painted flats and hokum, animated all the while only by this same desire, never fulfilled: truly to escape, if only for one instant; to poke his head through the borders of this world, with its harsh physics, into the mysterious spirit world that lay beyond. The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited “escapism” among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life.

Hilly Brown was trying to cope with the idea that, for the first time in his life, he had failed at something he really wanted to do. He had been pleased with the applause and congratulations, and he was not so self-deprecating as to mistake honest praise for politeness. But there was a stony part of him—the part which, under other circumstances, might have made him a great artist—which was not satisfied with honest praise. Honest praise, this stony part insisted, was what the bundlers of the world heaped on the heads of the barely competent. In short, honest praise was not enough… “What do you want, Hilly!?” [his mother] would have cried, throwing up her hands. “Dis-honest praise?” Ev, who saw much, and David, who saw more, could have told her. He wanted to make their eyes get so big they looked like they were going to fall out. He wanted to make the girls scream, and the boys yell... He would have traded all the honest praise and genuine applause in the world for just one scream, one belly-laugh, one woman fainting dead away like the booklet says they did when Harry Houdini did his famous milk-can escape. Because honest praise means you only got good. When they scream and laugh and faint, that means you got great. But he suspected—no, he knew—that he was never going to get great, and all the want in the world wasn’t going to change that fact. It was a bitter blow—not the failure itself, so much as the knowing it couldn’t be changed. It was like the end of Santa Clause, in a way.

What’s that like? 1) Picture being jailer to Harry Houdini; 2) multiply by five hundred.

Presently we descended toward the Sphinx, and sat silent beneath the spell of those terrible unseeing eyes.

What was at stake for him was not so much risk taking as the experiencing of the risk. He could bring the drama to climax—of fight or flight, as it were—but he was merely ridding himself of the drama. It was anticipation itself that had become a phobic object,because it ushered him towards a threshold of action. Between waiting and wanting and doing something about it there was a terror, a delay that seemed unbearable. There was a Jekyll of definite intent, and a Hyde fobbing him o with either satisfaction—the kiss “planted” as he would say—or evasion, the hurried (and harried) rush home.

I’m tired of fighting … I can’t fight any more.” Those were his last words.

❞ «لقد توصَّلت إلى قاعدة عامة، وهي أنه كلما زاد ذكاء الشخص وثقافته، زادت سهولة إرباكه وتحييره» ❝

Harry was nervous about the séance, but he agreed to participate. Perhaps there was some part of him that actually hoped he could communicate with Cecilia. He still missed his mother terribly. Sir Arthur was thrilled with the results of the séance. His wife filled fifteen pages with messages for Harry, expressing Cecilia’s love for him and how much she missed him. Sir Arthur thought Harry had to be as convinced as he was. Surely he couldn’t deny this kind of evidence.

As creator Gibson tells it, the character evolved almost by accident. In 1930, Street and Smith—prolific producers of pulp fiction magazines—decided to try the new medium, radio, in an effort to boost circulation. Once a week a drama would be adapted from an upcoming issue of Detective Story. Adapter Harry Engman Charlot added the gimmick of the mysterious host, called him the Shadow, and left the link to the magazine somewhat tenuous. “Apparently,” wrote Gibson in his Shadow Scrapbook, “some listeners didn’t get this message clearly, because instead of asking about Detective Story Magazine, they wanted the magazine that told about the Shadow.” The answer was obvious—a new magazine, with the Shadow as its nucleus. Gibson, then a hustling freelancer whose acquaintances included magicians Houdini and Blackstone, was called in to help develop the character and get the new publication off the ground.

He was born on March 24, 1874, in Budapest, Hungary. His real name was Ehrich Weiss. But during his lifetime, Harry always said his birthday was April 6, because that is what his mother told him.

Doors only lock, Because enemy within scares more than outside

the Harry Houdini on stage, that is.

You make your choices and sometimes, like Harry Houdini himself, everything, even your death, has to do with who you are and how you lived your life. You die the death you made for yourself by the way you lived.

pp 9-10 : "The thing is, when Houdini was alive, a lot of people believed that he had supernatural powers. He did such amazing things that people couldn't believe he was just doing tricks. [...] When he was alive, Houdini never claimed to have supernatural powers. He insisted that he was just doing tricks. But he also said something else. He told his wife Bess that after he died, if there was any way for him to come back from the dead and communicate with her, he would do it. If *anybody* could come back from the dead, it would be Harry Houdini.