Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
Derren Brown
141 quotes
“I deeply, and widely, believe that performance is a very personal affair, and that one must pursue one’s own sense of integrity and remain a little detached from advice and precedent offered by tradition.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I decided that my magic had to change. That I had to give serious thought to presentation. That, in fact, my presentation of the effects is where my impact as a magician lies – I realised that it can turn a good effect into something artistic and stunning.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Magicians do not, as a rule, presume that their audiences are intelligent and sensitive enough to want the magic to be challenging and cathartic. This is not a healthy starting point, for it stultifies magic and leaves it too close to children’s entertainment.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Few things make me more livid than insulting bad theatre of any sort. Conversely, perfectly realised and exquisitely elegant performance can move me deeply and reduce me to sobbing like a big girl.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One minute she is a sweet old silly, knitting herself a set of syringe covers and talking about her favourite flowers, and the very next moment she has told you and your friends she has a ring supporting the back of her vagina.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Uninformed strong opinions - and I particularly include religious ones, which for some reason get special treatment - are of course mere clusters of prejudices and no more appropriate than mine, yours or anyone else's are on topics we don't understand - as worthless as my opinions on hockey, Noel Edmonds or rimming.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One can be a true believer in anything: psychic ability, Christianity or, as Bertrand Russell classically suggested (with irony), in the fact there is a teapot orbiting the earth. I could believe any of those things with total conviction. But my conviction doesn't make them true. Indeed, it is something of an insult to the very truth I might hold dear to say that something is true just because I believe it is.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The appreciation of a painting or a piece of music, for example, or even falling in love, is all about our subjectivity. But to decide that the entire universe operates in such a way, let alone to go to war because we are so convinced we are right that others must agree with us or die, that surely should demand a higher level of argument than 'It's true because I really, really feel it is.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are allowed to question people about their politics or ethics and expect them to defend their beliefs, or at least hold their own in any other important matter by recourse to evidence, yet somehow on the massive subject of God and how he might have us behave, all rational discussion must stop the moment we hear 'I believe'.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Moderate religious people may of course express distaste for such violence, pretending that the clear calls for grotesque and violent behaviour in their sacred book aren't there and cherry-picking the 'nice bits', but they are still guilty of not opening up the subject of belief to rational discourse, and in doing so are part of the machinery that leads to all the ugliness caused by fundamentalism.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science is unusual in that it is cumulative. It is a system built over time, wherein useful information is retained and ideas that simply don't stand up are discarded, based on the confirmation of knowledge through testing.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If a piece of 'alternative medicine' can be shown to work reliably, it ceases to become alternative. It just becomes medicine.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For a while now I have concerned myself with engaging people’s beliefs. A large part of me wishes to have people retain a scepticism about what I do and apply that to other areas in life where our beliefs are manipulated in ugly ways.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you concern yourself with telling or showing people how interesting you are, you will at best provoke a temporary response of polite interest until even that gives way to annoyance. If you let people find it out for themselves, you become a real source of fascination.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a real irony to the NLPers I knew who prided themselves on their communication skills yet because of their need to let everyone know how engaging they were, they were among the least engaging”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The sort of ill-informed armchair moralizing that pours from the permanently outraged, Daily Mail-reading mentality is one of the more revolting and frightening aspects of our society.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the same breath, one might add that the atheist is surely as religious as the Christian, in that he has adopted a set of beliefs to which he chooses to rigorously adhere. While it’s temptingly clever to make that claim, it is a nonsensical statement; no more logical than to say that a Christian is a type of atheist. Having a set of beliefs about religion is not the same as being a religious True Believer.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All told, kindness is not fashionable”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most people think themselves kind enough, but rather like a magician thinking he is fooling an audience who can see through his trick, we are the worst judges of the effect we have on others. True, we can mentally point out various kindnesses we have committed and those pleasant aspects of ourselves. Yet by doing so, we ignore the real test cases: how we behave under pressure, how nice we are to people we don’t like, how we deal with other people who seem determined to not live up to our unrealistic expectations.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To forgive purely because it is nicer to forgive, and to do so when it’s a tough call; to try to speak only kindly of those we know because it is preferable to do so; to enjoy the successes of others because living thus is more enjoyable than the stress of living resentfully: such kind things make us better, lovlier people. And to try to live this way for its own merits, without invoking a supernatural reason for doing so, is to celebrate our humanity and to give kindness back its teeth.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dull magic is a collection of tricks: great magic should sting.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The balls, the chutzpah, the gall, nerve and impudence of the successful lie that is huge enough never to be questioned is always a source of immense professional pleasure amongst magicians with any sense of the theatrical.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There will always be liars, swindlers and charlatans. Hopefully there will also always be the modern Houdinis and the seekers of the truth, snapping at their heels and holding them to account.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have had no formal training in painting: I gave up Art A level because I was sick of drawing peppers.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The potential for self-loathing comes from the unavoidable problem that one is engaging in a childish, fraudulent activity: although it has the capacity to delight and amaze, the performer is also a hair’s breadth from being justifiably treated like a silly child. It is, after all, just tricks.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since the 1920s, grand illusion on stage has been synonymous with the restraint and mutilation of female assistants, as if the first act a lucky mortal, newly endowed with the ability to overturn the laws of the universe, would wish to carry out would be the casual torture of the fairer sex for our entertainment.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the extraordinary father of modern conjuring, made the salient point that ‘a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician’. This is a very good description. However, an actor takes for granted how to create drama in every word, movement and look. The average magician is barely aware of its existence.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In magic, anyone with a shop-bought trick deck is a magician, and if people aren’t fooled they usually pretend to be, and they are understandably likely to mistake being fooled as a sign of being in the presence of an excellent magician.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The desire to impress is an efficient means of bringing out one’s least impressive qualities.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The single most valuable human trait, the one quality every schoolchild and adult should be taught to nurture, is, quite simply, kindness.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A diner having a row with a waiter in a swanky restaurant chills the blood in a way that a quarrel over a pizza order elsewhere would never do. Compassion is rarely the custom of the privileged.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we are customarily annoyed by what we see as the failings of others, we are judging them by a ludicrous standard: we are assuming that they fully understand our desires, quite possibly better than we do, and that they have nothing to do but arrange things to fall seamlessly into place around our probably ill-communicated wishes.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Each of us is leading a difficult life, and when we meet people we are seeing only a tiny part of the thinnest veneer of their complex, troubled existences. To practice anything other than kindness towards them, to treat them in any way save generously, is to quietly deny their humanity.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I cannot see the word ‘troubled’ prefixing the name of some poor starlet who has been dragged through the mire of tabloid spite without vomiting directly onto the newspaper. Troubled by whom? Troubled by you, you fuckwits.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The interest in Lego may have come later. Certainly the grown-up Technic variant, with it gears and cogs and motors, fascinated me the most, and presumably some way into adolescence, as I remember constructing a colourful mechanical Wanking Machine during long periods upstairs in my room. The inevitable problem of round pegs and square holes sadly rendered this particular project fruitless, on many levels, but the manufacturers might like to take note of the idea when planning other themed kits for their teenage boy demographic.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have retained a belief that it is the popular sporty kids at school who grow up to have the least interesting lives, and the unhappy young souls who develop into the most extraordinary adults. Whoever heard of a creative genius being understood as a child and well loved by his class mates? Who like to imagine an artist who emerged into adulthood content with his lot? And, conversely, how satisfying to hear that almost without exception, the untroubled, popular kids at school have ended up blandly as accountants, solicitors or ‘in IT’. Hold on, misfits, your day will come.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Participant. A participant is active, a part of the process, and a necessary component of the magical experience. This is how it should be. No magic happens unless the participant perceives it as magical, so she can never be a mere spectator.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Magic means nothing. It has the potential to connect us to something wonderful, as does any performance, but it is not wonderful in itself, for it is inseparable from the particular performance in which it is experienced. A magician who is too fast, too slow, mumbles, shouts, smells, is unlikeable or incomprehensible will unavoidably taint his magic with his personal failings.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most cursory look at cold-reading and suggestion tells us that Tarot cards are not evil; psychics do not ‘usher in’ the Devil or his minions; and even the creepy old Ouija board can be shown to operate via quite everyday, natural, physical forces.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Memory tricks, amongst other things which I’ll show you, have got me banned from a lot of Casinos in this country.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People are always saying, “Can you use your skills to get extraordinarily beautiful women into bed?” Well... yes, yes I can.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All of us can be influenced through psychological techniques. For example, if I say “don’t think of a black cat” what do you do? You think of a black cat because the command ‘think of a black cat’ was there in the sentence. Techniques like this can be used to influence people’s thoughts, behaviour, even their memory.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the techniques that I use to imitate psychic phenomena is photographic memory.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the reasons I enjoy going to the Opera is the spectacle of an audience enraptured. Their emotions are engaged, their passions brought to the fore, they become highly sensitive.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My techniques are concerned with reading signals from people, tiny unconscious clues that betray their thoughts. I tend to see it like a game...”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For me, the most enjoyable aspect of going out and performing is that I never know how susceptible people will be to my methods.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every day when you leave your home you give away more than you could ever imagine about who you are and what you do.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A good communicator affects our physiology. The power of voice can entrance us – even induce or remove pain.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Walthamstow Stadium: Where hundreds of men, who all look like my dad, come to watch some thin dogs running around.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Shopping Malls: Modern cathedrals to spending money. They’re designed to disorientate us and make us stay longer than we need to. Every brick is there to manipulate us to buy.”
Derren Brown (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source