Secret Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

And the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God.

Each man, if he attempts to join himself to others, is on all sides cramped and diminished of his proportion; and the stricter theunion, the smaller and the more pitiful he is. But leave him alone, to recognize in every hour and place the secret soul, he will go up and down doing the works of a true member, and, to the astonishment of all, the work will be done with concert, though no man spoke.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors and looking them piteously in the eyes—die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed.

Edgar Allan Poe

A certain great and powerful king once asked a poet: "What can I give you of all that I have?" He wisely replied, "Anything sir... except your secret."

We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight! Then we can no longer take them into account in the total which is our personality. But they know of secret paths by which to return to us.

The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.

Theodor W. Adorno

To the intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and many an Oedipus arrives: he has the whole mystery teeming in his brain.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

These things he said in words. But much in his heart remained unsaid. For he himself could not speak his deeper secret.

You anticipate what I would say, though you cannot know how earnestly I say it, how earnestly I feel it, without knowing my secret heart, and the hopes and fears and anxieties with which it has long been laden. Dear Doctor Manette, I love your daughter fondly, dearly, disinterestedly, devotedly. If ever there were love in the world, I love her.

Charles Dickens

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.

Bertrand Russell

What are novels? What is the secret of the charm of every romance that ever was written? The first thing in a good novel is to place the persons together in circumstances which naturally call out the high feelings and thoughts of the character, which afford food for sympathy between them on these points — romantic events they are called. The second is that the heroine has generally no family ties (almost invariably no mother), or, if she has, these do not interfere with her entire independence.
These two things constitute the main charm of reading novels.

Florence Nightingale

The more one sees of human fate and the more one examines its secret springs of action, the more one is impressed by the strength of unconscious motives and by the limitations of free choice

Don't only practise your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise man to the Divine.

Ludwig van Beethoven

We live in her midst and know her not. She is incessantly speaking to us, but betrays not her secret. We constantly act upon her, and yet have no power over her.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The secret of great battles consists in knowing how to deploy and concentrate at the right time.

Napoleon I of France

Evil never goes unpunished, Monsieur. But the punishment is sometimes secret.

Agatha Christie

We are all sons and daughters of the Most High, but the Anointed One was His first-born, who dwelt in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and He walked among us and we beheld Him.
All this I say that you may understand not only in the mind but rather in the spirit. The mind weighs and measures but it is the spirit that reaches the heart of life and embraces the secret; and the seed of the spirit is deathless.
The wind may blow and then cease, and the sea shall swell and then weary, but the heart of life is a sphere quiet and serene, and the star that shines therein is fixed for evermore.

Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.

Elizabeth I of England

If you mean you think it is my job to go into the secret passage first, O Thorin Thrain's son Oakenshield, may your beard grow ever longer, he said crossly, say so at once and have done!

J. R. R. Tolkien

We do not say anything about future products. We work on them in secret, then we announce them.

Women are better at keeping secrets, but men are more comfortable with them.

Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the "Secret Annexe." The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story.

And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.

It is not in the least likely that any life has ever been lived which was not a failure in the secret judgment of the person who lived it.