Secret Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Nobody near me here, but rats, and they are fine stealthy secret fellows.

Charles Dickens

Of all those in the army close to the commander none is more intimate than the secret agent; of all rewards none more liberal than those given to secret agents; of all matters none is more confidential than those relating to secret operations.

The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

John F. Kennedy

The only secret people keep
Is Immortality.

Emily Dickinson

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

[the] motions [of Mars] provide the only possible access to the hidden secrets of astronomy, without which we would remain forever ignorant of those secrets.

Johannes Kepler

Who shall doubt "the secret hid Under Cheops' pyramid" Was that the contractor did Cheops out of several million?

Rudyard Kipling

My son, whoever wishes to keep a secret, must hide from us that he possesses one. Self complaisance over the concealed destroys its concealment.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one's destiny to do, and then do it.

Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.

Jean-Paul Sartre

The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.

The more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn't matter if the things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.

The sciences, which have revealed so many secrets and destroyed so many prejudices, are destined to render us yet greater service. New truths, new discoveries will unveil secrets still more essential to the happiness of men — but only if we give our esteem to the scientists and our protection to the sciences.

Napoleon I of France

The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.

There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves.

George Bernard Shaw

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

George Bernard Shaw

A beautiful person among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods; and we can pardonpride, when a woman possesses such a figure that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.

Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fig tree, how long it's been full meaning for me, the way you almost entirely omit to flower and into the seasonably-resolute fruit uncelebratedly thrust your purest secret. Like the tube of a fountain, your bent bough drives the sap downwards and up: and it leaps from its sleep, scarce waking, into the joy of its sweetest achievement.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I have no secret. There are no rules to follow in business. I just work hard and, as I always have done, believe I can do it. Most of all, though, I try to have fun.

Richard Branson

Generally he perceived in men of devout simplicity this opinion: that the secrets of nature were the secrets of God, — part of that glory into which man is not to press too boldly.

Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.

I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other terrible thoughts that gnaw me

Free, open love I have looked upon as dog's love. Secret love is, besides, cowardly.