Secret Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Reprove your friend in secret and praise him openly.

Leonardo da Vinci

We could not help being struck by the seeming, though innocent, indifference of Nature to these men's necessities, while elsewhereshe was equally serving others. Like a true benefactress, the secret of her service is unchangeableness. Thus is the busiest merchant, though within sight of his Lowell, put to pilgrim's shifts, and soon comes to staff and scrip and scallop-shell.

Henry David Thoreau

We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in Art.

Of all things I liked books best. My father had a large library and whenever I could manage I tried to satisfy my passion for reading. He did not permit it and would fly in a rage when he caught me in the act. He hid the candles when he found that I was reading in secret. He did not want me to spoil my eyes. But I obtained tallow, made the wicking and cast the sticks into tin forms, and every night I would bush the keyhole and the cracks and read, often till dawn.
Chapter 2 : Extraordinary Experiences

You would know the secret of death. But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life.

To one who reads the spirit of the Gita, it teaches the secret of nonviolence, the secret of realizing self through the physical body.

Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.

G. K. Chesterton

To produce things and to rear them,
To produce, but not to take possession of them,
To act, but not to rely on one's own ability,
To lead them, but not to master them —
This is called profound and secret virtue.

What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, and yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar.

But it does not seem that I can trust anyone,' said Frodo. Sam looked at him unhappily. 'It all depends on what you want,' put in Merry. 'You can trust us to stick with you through thick and thin—to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours—closer than you keep it yourself. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo.

J. R. R. Tolkien

The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is nothing more visible than what is secret, and nothing more manifest than what is minute.

The great mother Nature will not quite tell her secret to the coach or the steamboat, but says, One to one, my dear, is my rule also, and I keep my enchantments and oracles for the religious soul coming alone, or as good as alone, in true-love.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thus every creature, and of every kind,
The secret joys of sweet coition find.
Not only man's imperial race, but they
That wing the liquid air, or swim the sea,
Or haunt the desert, rush into the flame:
For love is lord of all, and is in all the same.

A mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe, for felicity.

Thomas Jefferson

A secret needs two faces to bounce between; a secret needs to see itself in another pair of eyes.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Something sinister in the tone Told me my secret must be known: Word I was in the house alone Somehow must have gotten abroad, Word I was in my life alone, Word I had no one left but God.

I am going to tell you something you must not tell to any human being. We have split the atom. The report of the great experiment has just come in. A bomb was let off in some wild spot in New Mexico. It was only a thirteen-pound bomb, but it made a crater half a mile across. People ten miles away lay with their feet towards the bomb; when it went off they rolled over and tried to look at the sky. But even with the darkest glasses it was impossible. It was the middle of the night, but it was as if seven suns had lit the earth; two hundred miles away the light could be seen. The bomb sent up smoke into the stratosphere... It is the Second Coming. The secret has been wrested from nature... Fire was the first discovery; this is the second.

Winston Churchill

When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.