Best Elusive Quotes

#1. America's Declaration of Independence speaks of "the pursuit of happiness," but nowhere in the Bible are we told to pursue this. Happiness is elusive, and we don't find it by seeking it.

Billy Graham

#2. I dreamed of death the way previously I'd dreamed of the pain leaving me, and the way before that I'd dreamed of gardens and children and weekends away. Death was my elusive lover, treasured and longed for and jealously guarded, and always distant. Always out of reach.

Elizabeth Haynes

#3. The harder we try to catch hold of the moment, to seize a pleasant sensation ... , the more elusive it becomes ... It is like trying to clutch water in one's hands - the harder one grips, the faster it slips through one's fingers.

Alan Watts

#4. Nothing that exists can be comic; it was like a floating analogy, almost entirely elusive, with certain aspects of vaudeville.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#5. That wish to enter into an elusive element which had urged Cosimo into the trees, was still working now inside him unsatisfied, making him long for a more intimate link, a relationship which would bind him to each leaf and twig and feather and flutter.

Italo Calvino

#6. ...the state of perfection is an elusive goal; demanding something so obscure as almost unattainable and can become a compulsive, crazy making squirrel-on-a-wheel way of living.

David W. Earle

#7. Hell of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning ...

Jean Baudrillard

#8. 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.

K'naan

#9. Everyone, some sooner than others, must endure his or her own personal 'hell on earth.' It is important to keep searching for the small joys, although they are often the most elusive. Trust that these joys will appear, sometimes unexpectedly, and often in life's darkest moments.

Katie Gill

#10. I'd once been told that if a man wanted something he did not have, no matter how elusive that thing was, if his feet do not restrain him from chasing it, he would eventually grab it. This was our case.

Chigozie Obioma

#11. If you can surrender your protection devices, in order to track the potentially raw and perhaps elusive emotions that are the song's DNA, then that is creative vulnerability, which is ultimately hugely empowering.

Tori Amos

#12. Learn to respect this sacred moment of birth, as fragile, as fleeting, as elusive as dawn.

Frederick Leboyer

#13. I think for a group that has a reputation for being shy and elusive, we're actually outspoken.

Stevie Jackson

#14. Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. Sculpture in stone alone comes near it in obstinacy.

Jan Tschichold

#15. We are all pilgrims on an elusive and endless road ... Despite our attempts to build lives on stone foundations, our spirits continuously flow. Endless streams of consciousness ripple through our minds.

Anthony Lawlor

#16. We had approached nearer to absolute Truth, which, like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery.

Joseph Conrad

#17. If we believe that the universe is unfriendly and that our very souls are in danger, peace will be elusive at best.

Joan Z. Borysenko

#18. I believe, my lady, that life is the phantom, and love still more fleeting and elusive - here one minute like a sweet scent you can't quite recognize and gone the next. Best enjoy both while you can.

Dawn Hammill

#19. 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.

Marie Lu

#20. I'm not at my best when I moralize or philosophize. Logic is elusive, especially to one who so rarely uses it.

Tallulah Bankhead

#21. 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.

Lukas Foss

#22. The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium28, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.

Bill Bryson

#23. 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.

Dara Horn

#24. When you were the son of evil, there was little you couldn't do, own, or kill, and yet her mortal self was an elusive trophy he could touch, but not put on his shelf.
This made her rare. This made her precious.
This made him ... love her.

J.R. Ward

#25. But a sort of rupture-in anguish-leaves us at the limit of tears: in such a case we lose ourselves, we forget ourselves and communicate with an elusive beyond.

Georges Bataille

#26. The desert wears ... a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act it seems to be waiting
but waiting for what?

Edward Abbey

#27. But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.

Donna Tartt

#28. The Marquis had known whom he had wanted not to be, when he was a boy. He had definitely not wanted to be like Peregrine. He had not wanted to be like anyone at all. He had, instead, wanted to be elegant, elusive, brilliant and, above all things, he had wanted to be unique.
Just like Peregrine.

Neil Gaiman

#29. I hope that I capture something in my work that is about the elusive, the magical and powerful and the transformative. The writing in itself is transformative for me.

H. Raven Rose

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

Julie Walters

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

Brian O'Driscoll

#32. The outfit soon took on color, dash and a unique flavor which is the essence of that elusive and deathless thing called soldiering.

Douglas MacArthur

#33. Love is such a thing. You have knowledge of what it is, but it defies careful explication."
"Love is a subtle concept," I admitted. "It's elusive, like justice, but it can be defined.

Patrick Rothfuss

#34. The truth is that trout fishermen scheme and lie and toss in their sleep. They dream of great dripping trout, shapely and elusive as mermaids, and arise cranky and haggard from their fantasies. They are moody and neglectful and all of them a little daft. Moreover they are inclined to drink too much.

John D. Voelker

#35. What really interests me about capturing and suspending movement is that I get to experience something invisible and inaudible, as elusive and fleeting as thought itself, and give it form ... Maybe my paintings are all just little fragments of the Cosmic Dance suspended in time.

James Nares

#36. The 'data' (given) of research are not so much given as taken out of a constantly elusive matrix of happenings. We should speak of capta rather than data.

R.D. Laing

#37. 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.

Bruce Cameron

#38. The act of focusing our mightiest intellectual resources on the elusive goal of goto-less programs has helped us get our minds off all those really tough and possibly unresolvable problems and issues with which today's professional programmer would otherwise have to grapple

John Brown

#39. We can sum up the surrealist distinction between 'literature' and 'poetry' by saying where the former is artificial, fictive and elusive, the latter is natural, real, direct and spontaneous.

Michael Richardson

#40. What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

Willa Cather

#41. 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.

Earl Nightingale

#42. As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas the consummation often turns out to be elusive.

Richard Hofstadter