What are tricks?

Famous quotes containing the word tricks:

    English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.
    Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    Let the new faces play what tricks they will
    In the old rooms; night can outbalance day,
    Our shadows rove the garden gravel still,
    The living seem more shadowy than they.
    William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

    Such tricks hath strong imagination
    That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
    It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
    Or in the night, imagining some fear,
    How easy is a bush supposed a bear?
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)