“Where secrecy reigns, carelessness and ignorance delight to hide while skill loves the light.”
“I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret.”
“Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.”
“His mind of man, a secret makes I meet him with a start he carries a circumference in which I have no part.”
“The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.”
“But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts benighted walks under the mid-day sun; Himself is his own dungeon.”
“The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.”
“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.”
“Shy and unready men are great betrayers of secrets; for there are few wants more urgent for the moment than the want of something to say.”
“Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.”
“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.”
“The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.”
“O divine art of subtlety and secrecy! Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible and hence we can hold the enemy's fate in our hands.”
“What one hides is worth neither more nor less than what one finds. And what one hides from oneself is worth neither more nor less than what one allows others to find.”
“Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.”
“He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”
“Our true history is scarcely ever deciphered by others. The chief part of the drama is a monologue, or rather an intimate debate between God, our conscience, and ourselves. Tears, grieves, depressions, disappointments, irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, deliberations --all these belong to our secret, and are almost all incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to speak of them, and even when we write them down.”
“When a friend, then, indulges in the joy of unburdening a secret on to another friend's bosom, he makes the latter, in his turn, feel the urge to taste the same joy himself. He implores him, it is true, not to tell a soul; but if such a condition were taken absolutely literally, it would at once cut off the flow of these joys at their very source. The general practice is for the secret to be confided only to an equally trustworthy friend, the same conditions being imposed on him. And so from trustworthy friend to trustworthy friend the secret goes moving on round that immense chain, until finally it reaches the ears of just the very person or persons whom the first talker had expressly intended it never should reach.”