This page contains a list of magic tricks. In magic literature, tricks are often called effects. Based strictly upon published literature and marketed effects, there are hundreds of millions of effects; a short performance routine by a single magician may contain dozens of effects.
Some serious students of magic strive to refer to effects by a proper name, and are also concerned with the proper attribution of the effect's creator. For example, consider an effect where the magician shows four aces, and then they turn face up one at a time in a mysterious fashion. This effect might be recognized as Twisting the Aces, which is attributed to Dai Vernon, based on a false count invented by Alex Elmsley. Some tricks are listed merely with their marketed name (particularly those that are sold as stand-alone tricks by retail dealers), whereas others are listed by the name given within magic publications.
Read more about Magic Tricks: Stage Illusions, Close-up Effects, Mentalism, Levitations, Utilities/Accessories
Famous quotes containing the words magic and/or tricks:
“You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion.... Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“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)