Top 50 Elusive Quotes

I guess I’m attracted to more archaic words because they can be imbued with more meaning, because their definition is elusive.

Being a classical musician, you can go to school for it; you can go get a degree. Even as a composer, there is a certain career path you can follow, but becoming a rock musician is a much more elusive career. How do you learn that or do that?

I greatly enjoy reading the biographies of scientists, and when doing so I always hope to learn the secrets of their success. Alas, those secrets generally remain elusive.

I still don’t feel I know Hitchcock at all. I find that the more one looks, the more elusive he becomes. But my admiration for Hitchcock the filmmaker remains undiminished. He is a giant of the cinema and the darkness in him informs his cinematic language. You can’t separate one from the other.

Carlos Condit does the best job of being the counterstriking guy that is very elusive.

If you can play guitar and sing, you can probably get a gig down the road playing at a restaurant, but don’t throw your life away chasing something that is so elusive it will only lead you to regret and may turn you bitter.

Ideas are elusive, slippery things. Best to keep a pad of paper and a pencil at your bedside, so you can stab them during the night before they get away.

Although the elusive ‘cure’ may be a distant dream, understanding the true nature of cancer will enable it to be better controlled and less menacing.

Respect can be as elusive as the unicorn. I know something of this because I write books that are set in the Middle Ages, and the historical novel is often seen as the unwanted stepchild in the fictional family. I know even more about respect – or the lack thereof – because I live in New Jersey.

That transition from child to adult actor is so incredibly elusive. The roles that were coming to me as a young adult were not that great, but I was taking them anyway to pay the rent. And the more bad roles in bad movies I took, the less anybody wanted me for a good role in a good movie.

I don’t write songs about a specific, elusive thing.

I thought that, with so much current attention focused on the topic of North Korea, I might share what I think are three books which cast a rare light on the elusive realm of North Korea.

We secretly believe that if only we achieve some elusive goal – fitting into a pair of skinny jeans, or redoing our kitchen or getting that promotion – that it will make us happy. But the pain of our insecurity is hidden in all that racing around.

You can get this feeling of the English or Scottish or Irish or Welsh fairy, but it is by nature very elusive. It would be possible to pin down a German fairy, but the English one just vanishes, becomes the shadow under the trees.

As a writer, I try to appeal to the ‘elusive boy audience’ the same way I try to appeal to everyone: I do the very best I can to create interesting characters, addictive plots, tons of conflict, believable settings, unexpected plot twists, intriguing beginnings, and satisfying endings.

Crispy-skinned fish is an elusive thing. As soon as your filet makes contact with a hot pan, it wants to curl up, which leads to uneven cooking and floppy skin.

Art is something in which you are never an expert at any point of time. It’s something you hone all the time and something which is elusive all the time.

Romance, like the rabbit at the dog track, is the elusive, fake, and never attained reward which, for the benefit and amusement of our masters, keeps us running and thinking in safe circles.

We have enforced a Darwinian process on wolves, turning them into the shy and elusive animals they’ve become. They didn’t have that fear of us 30,000 years ago. We didn’t have gunpowder; we had rocks. Wolves would have seen us as lunch, and we were weak and slow and tasty.

The elusive truth is that there is nothing stress-producing in the physical world. Things simply are. Molecules move. Light and sound appear.

Look at ISIS – without the Internet, they wouldn’t exist in the same form. The Internet didn’t create them, but the Internet facilitates them. And as we know from history, the facilitation is more dangerous than the cause, because the cause can be dealt with, but the facilitation is elusive.

It’s about never giving up until your hand is on the wall. I think people who get complacent, who think that they are in front, a sloppy touch, can cost you that elusive medal, just as much as the people who are gunning for you. If you believe you can get there right to the very end, miracles do happen.

Being explosive, quick, elusive and fast helps my game, so I do tons of lunges, leg press and different explosion type of runs.

In my long experience, one thing I know is that truth is elusive.

The best way to investigate the elusive phenomenon called the creative process may well be to target all the misconceptions, to explain what the creative process is not.

I don’t write songs about a specific, elusive thing. I write about love, and everyone knows what it is like to have your heart broken.

In the frantic search for an elusive ‘cure,’ few researchers stand back and ask a very basic question: why does cancer exist? What is its place in the grand story of life?

People still look for that elusive record deal, but you still can release records on your own, which is amazing.

Everybody wants a movie career. I found that pretty elusive. I did make a movie with Martin Sheen about a nuclear scientist who has a religious experience. I don’t even know what it was called. I don’t think it was ever released.

When I was in art school, I worried that being a painter seemed like it could be an elusive dream, and fashion seemed so much more secure.

I think one of the primary themes in my work is the paradox of memory, at once fundamental to our sense of who we are and yet elusive, ever-changing, fragmentary. One way to look at this is to say that, therefore, we ourselves are elusive, ever-changing and fragmentary to ourselves.

Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record keepers, forever searching past events for elusive patterns – and forever believing that such patterns are to be found.

Since age seven, I’ve been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

Love is the most elusive thing I know. Always an arm’s length away, teasing me and asking me to stretch a bit more and grab it.

There’s an elusive element to comedy, but nobody gets it for free. That’s why comedians seldom criticise each other.

Confidence can be elusive because you don’t know you’ve lost it. It’s not something you can put your finger on.

I think people do their bravest work when given an elusive canvas. That would be seemingly the weirdest, but also the most wonderful.

Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.

An elusive, enigmatic aura will make people want to know more, drawing them into your circle. Create such a power by hinting at something contradictory within you.

I think at times I read too much of my own press. I wish I was better at taking in how great my life is, but that’s surprisingly elusive. I tend to be very hard on myself and insecure about failing no matter what happens.

Hormones get no respect. We think of them as the elusive chemicals that make us a bit moody, but these magical little molecules do so much more.

Why do alcoholics begin down the same hazardous road day after day? They are in search of that elusive window of well-being that opens when you drink your way out of a hangover and aren’t yet drunk all over again. The alcoholic’s day consists of trying to keep that window open.

There are few industries as defiantly opaque as shipping. Even offshore bankers have not developed a system as intricately elusive as the flag of convenience, under which ships can fly the flag of a state that has nothing to do with its owner, cargo, crew, or route.

For a kid, self-esteem can be as close at hand as a sports victory or a sense of belonging in a peer group. It’s a much more complicated and elusive proposition for adults, subject to the responsibilities and vicissitudes of grown-up life.

I guess I’m kind of interested in that elusive search for a bond between life and work and between compassion and competitiveness. There’s always something at the end you have to find to live a full life, but it’s hard to find.

I think comedy’s something you can’t learn. It’s an instinct, which makes it rather elusive.

Timmy Horan was a childhood hero. He was a great distributor, elusive, good stepper, very physical, defensively very sound. What a rounded player.

I think it’s a mistake to work on success in career. I’ve worked on my passions obsessively. How can I say what I want to say more precisely than the last time I said it? Success is such an elusive concept. When you work for it, I think you get it in a way you might regret it.

Every reporter inhales skepticism. You interview people, and they lie. You face public figures, diligently making notes or taping what is said, and they perform their interviews to fit a calculated script. The truth, alas, is always elusive.