Secrets

Sunday, June 16, 2013 – Secrets

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. ~ Benjamin Franklin

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The man who can keep a secret may be wise, but he is not half as wise as the man with no secrets to keep. ~ E. W. Howe

Confession is always weakness. The grave soul keeps its own secrets, and takes its own punishment in silence. ~ Dorothy Dix

In all secrets there is a kind of guilt, however beautiful or joyful they may be, or for what good end they may be set to serve. Secrecy means evasion, and evasion means a problem to the moral mind. ~ Gilbert Parker

Well the protester I think is a very powerful thing. It’s basically a mechanism of democracy that, along with capitalism, scientific innovation, those things have built the modern world. And it’s wonderful that the new tools have empowered that protestor so that state secrets, bad developments are not hidden anymore. ~ Bill Gates

If we knew each other’s secrets, what comforts we should find. ~ John Churton Collins

A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets. ~ Gloria Stuart

Sharing secrets is the way in which women tie themselves together, for it reveals complicity and trust. Holding secrets shows trustworthiness and a sort of quite defiance. It is a natural thing for a female to hold secrets within her breast until the time is ripe to release them. Does it not follow the way in which her body is formed? A woman is made with that dark and mysterious recess that can grow a child safely until the child is ready to come out onto the birthing bed. And like birthing, secrets present themselves in many ways. some slip easily into the world, others must be torn out, if the body is unwilling. ~ Kathleen Kent, The Heretic’s Daughter

A man’s true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others. ~ Paul Valery

Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets. ~ Paul Tournier

You know there are no secrets in America. It’s quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people. ~ W. H. Auden

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. ~ John Updike

Journalists belong in the gutter because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets. ~ Gerald Priestland

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it. ~ Roald Dahl

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter – they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. ~ Sylvia Plath

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name. ~ George Orwell, 1984

A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know. ~ Diane Arbus

A secret’s worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides. ~ André Malraux

Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned. ~ James Joyce

When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. ~ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Secrets… are the very root of cool. ~ William Gibson, Spook Country

Nothing in this world is hidden forever. The gold which has lain for centuries unsuspected in the ground, reveals itself one day on the surface. Sand turns traitor, and betrays the footstep that has passed over it; water gives back to the tell-tale surface the body that has been drowned. Fire itself leaves the confession, in ashes, of the substance consumed in it. Hate breaks its prison-secrecy in the thoughts, through the doorway of the eyes; and Love finds the Judas who betrays it by a kiss. Look where we will, the inevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature: the lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen. ~ Wilkie Collins

There is no friendship that cares about an overheard secret. ~ Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

There is something about a closet that makes a skeleton terribly restless. ~ John Barrymore

I don’t think secrets agree with me, I feel rumpled up in mind since you told me that… ~ Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

There can be, if I forebode aright, no power, short of the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried with a human heart. The heart, making itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce hold them, until the day when all hidden things shall be revealed. Nor have I so read or interpreted the Holy Writ, as to understand that the disclosure of human thoughts and deeds, then to be made, is intended as part of the retribution. That, surely, were a shallow view of it. No; these revelations, unless I greatly error, are meant merely to promote the intellectual satisfaction of all intelligent beings, who will stand waiting, on that day, to see the dark problem of this life made plain. A knowledge of men’s hearts will be needful to the completest solution of that problem. And I conceive, moreover, that the hearts holding such secrets as you speak of will yield them up, at that last day, not with reluctance, but with a joy unutterable. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

There are certain things in a man’s past which he does not divulge to everybody but, perhaps, only to his friends. Again there are certain things he will not divulge even to his friends; he will divulge them perhaps only to himself, and that, too, as a secret. But, finally, there are things which he is afraid to divulge even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things in his mind. I can put it even this way: the more decent a man is, the larger will the number of such things be. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. ~ Charles Dickens

Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off. ~ Samuel Johnson