Quotes about secrets (2118 quotes, page 11)

“The animals of the Burgess Shale are holy objects—in the unconventional sense that this word conveys in some cultures. We do not place them on pedestals and worship from afar. We climb mountains and dynamite hillsides to find them. We quarry them, split them, carve them, draw them, and dissect them, struggling to wrest their secrets. We vilify and curse them for their damnable intransigence. They are grubby little creatures of a sea floor 530 million years old, but we greet them with awe because they are the Old Ones, and they are trying to tell us something.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Wonderful Life

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 52

Mountain , Sense , Animals , Drawing

“I make music all the time that no-one ever hears. Y' know, I sing in the shower, I hit on things. Music is life - life is music. Of all people, Nietzsche said 'Life without music is an error'. And so I'll be making music one way or another. Oh believe me, I make music.. I've made whole records that no-one heard. Oh they came out, no-one bought them! We used to do whole secret tours, we used to stand outside like 'We're playing tonight!”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

and only the bouncers and bartenders would see you. I'm used to it. I'm that tree that falls in the forest.
Clip for Studio4a http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6SuvanvZFY&feature=related at youtube.com

Life , People , Music , Way

“I always want to design a frame that’s open to everyone. I don’t see art as a secret code.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

“ Artist’s Quotes http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series-ai-weiwei/artists-quote.” Excerpted from a conversation with curators Juliet Bingham and Marko Daniel, Beijing, May 31 and June 1, 2010. Tate Museums, UK.
2010-, 2010

Art

“The present age delights in unearthing a great man's secrets; for one thing because we like to temper our admiration and also perhaps we have a vague hope of finding a clue to genius in such "revelations."”

André Malraux (1901–1976) French novelist, art theorist and politician

Part III, Chapter VI
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

Age , Hope

“"You have a secret passion for justice. Why don't you admit it?"
"I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people."”

Ross Macdonald (1915–1983) Novelist

The Goodbye Look (1969)

People , Justice , Passion

“Pythagoras says that number is the origin of all things, and certainly the law of number is the key that unlocks the secrets of the universe. But the law of number possesses an immanent order, which is at first sight mystifying, but on a more intimate acquaintance we easily understand it to be intrinsically necessary; and this law of number explains the wondrous consistency of the laws of nature.”

Paul Carus (1852–1919) American philosopher

"Reflections on Magic Squares" in The Monist, Vol. 16 (1906), p. 139

Law , Understanding , Nature , Universe

“the protective, healing silence of forgiveness is just as much part of confession as its quality of judgment - stressed so much more. For in confession sin is not so much subjected to the light of the word, of judicial sentence, as received into the darkness of merciful, secret acceptance, sunk into divine oblivion.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Letters p. 361.

Forgiveness , Light , Silence , Parting

“Our children should be taught to beware of everything foreign and not to disclose any state or party secrets to foreigners… for foreigners are eyes for their countries, and some of them are counterrevolutionary instruments”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

in the hands of imperialism
al-Dimuqratiyya Masdar Quwwa li al-Fard wa al-Mujtama, 1977, quoted in Saddam Hussein: a political biography (2002) by Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi.

Children , Country

“Do you want to know the secret of life? Bardo will tell you the secret of life: it's not the amount of time we have, despite what I've just said. No it's not quantity and it's not even quality. It's variety.”

David Zindell book Neverness

Neverness (1988)

Life , Time

“Now, I have something to tell you today. Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life — for the past five years. There have been rumors to this effect… but this is Apple's campus in Cupertino — let's zoom in on it — in that building right there… we've had teams doing the "just-in-case" scenario; and our rules have been that our designs for OS X must be processor independent, and that every project must be built for both the Power PC and Intel processors. And so today for the first time, I can confirm the rumors that every release of OS X has been compiled for both Power PC and Intel — this has been going on for the last five years. Just in case.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

2000s, WWDC 2005

Life , Time , Past

“Junior faculty members used to come up to me and say. "Wow, you got tenure early; what's your secret?" I said, "It's pretty simple, call me any Friday night in my office at 10 o'clock and I'll tell you."”

Randy Pausch book The Last Lecture

The Last Lecture (2007)

Night

“To his sight
The husk of natural objects opens quite
To the core; and every secret essence there
Reveals the elements of good and fair;
Making him see, where Learning hath no light.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

"The Poet," London Magazine (Oct 1821)

Nature , Light , Learning

“Love's secret is to be always doing things for God, and not to mind because they are such little ones.”

Frederick William Faber (1814–1863) British hymn writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 386.

Love , God

“On Omega, the law was kept secret. Older residents used their knowledge of the law to enforce their rule over the newcomers. This system was condoned and reinforced by the doctrine of the inequality of all men, which lay at the heart of the Omegan legal system. Through planned inequality and enforced ignorance, power and status remained in the hands of the older residents.”

Robert Sheckley book The Status Civilization

Source: The Status Civilization (1960), Chapter 5 (p. 26)

Men , Law , Knowledge , Heart

“Lenin was the contemporary politician whom [Mussolini] most admired and he studied the Russian revolution closely to see what lessons it offered. Lenin seemed to him ‘the very negation of socialism’ because he had not created a dictatorship of the proletariat or of the socialist party, but only of a few intellectuals who had found the secret of winning power. Mussolini was, in truth, envious.”

Denis Mack Smith (1920–2017) British historian

Source: Mussolini, 1983, p. 41

Truth , Study

“My secret desire is for the whole world to eventually play games and for games to have the kind of influence that books and movies do. Games are a great place for the planet's collective subconscious to grow as we further our understanding of each other.”

Jeremy Soule (1975) American composer

Jeremy Soule Interview https://web.archive.org/web/20021026151734/http://www.stratosgroup.com/features/interviews.php?selected=200206jsbh (June 04, 2002).
Attributed

Books , World , Game , Understanding

“Ichthyophils imagine that human beings want a life in which they can make their own choices. But what if they can be fulfilled only by a life in which they follow each other? The majority who obey the fashion of the day may be acting on a secret awareness that they lack the potential for a truly individual existence. Liberalism – the ichthyophil variety, at any rate – teaches that everyone yearns to be free. Herzen’s experience of the abortive European revolutions of 1848 led him to doubt that this was so. It was because of his disillusionment that he criticized Mill so sharply. But if it is true that Mill was deluded in thinking that everyone loves freedom, it may also be true that without this illusion there would be still less freedom in the world. The charm of a liberal way of life is that it enables most people to renounce their freedom unknowingly.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

An Old Chaos: Ichthyophils and Liberals (p. 62)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Love , Life , People , World

“A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its law and its rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.”

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) French philosopher (1930-2004)

Plato's Pharmacy, intro
Dissemination (1972)

Books , Law , Game

“The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being. Nor is its existence casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

VIII. Art and Artists
1910 - 1915, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911

Life , Art , Way

“The inflexible integrity of the moral code is, to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of History.
If we may debase the currency for the sake of genius, or success, or rank, or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a man’s influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his disgrace. Then History ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the Wanderer, the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of earth and religion itself tend constantly to depress. It serves where it ought to reign; and it serves the worst cause better than the purest.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

Letter to Mandell Creighton (5 April 1887), published in Historical Essays and Studies, by John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1907), edited by John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence, Appendix, p. 504; also in Essays on Freedom and Power (1972)

Religion , History , Suffering , Science

“To its very core, the mind of ressentiment man is filled with envy, the impulse to detract, malice, and secret vindictiveness. These affects have become fixed attitudes, detached from all determinate objects. Independently of his will, this man’s attention will be instinctively drawn by all events which can set these affects in motion. The ressentiment attitude even plays a role in the formation of perceptions, expectations, and memories. It automatically selects those aspects of experience which can justify the factual application of this pattern of feeling.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 74

Feeling , Memory , Envy

“Nothing is more capable of troubling our reason, and consuming our health, than secret notions of jealousy in solitude.”

Aphra Behn (1640–1689) British playwright, poet, translator and fiction writer

The History of Agnes de Castro, or the Force of Generous Love (1688).

Health , Jealousy , Solitude

“No state sorrier than that of the man who keeps up a continual round, and pries into "the secrets of the nether world," as saith the poet, and is curious in conjecture of what is in his neighbour's heart.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

II, 13
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book II

World , Heart

“Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus

God

“The greying east brightened, metamorphosed to pink, then red, and then the giant ball of fire rose out of the blackened hills. Across the desolation lay a supreme indifference, the casualness of night and another day, and yet the secret intimacy of those hills, their silent consoling wonder, made death a thing of no great importance. You could die, but the desert would hide the secret of your death, it would remain after you, to cover your memory with ageless wind and heat and cold.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Death , Memory , Night , Indifference

“Two is enough for a secret.”

Agatha Christie book The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)

“For years I've nursed a secret desire to spend the Fourth of July in a double hammock with a swingin' redheaded broad … but I could never find me a double hammock.”

Frank Sinatra (1915–1998) American singer and film actor

The Way You Wear Your Hat (1997)

“All his life he had heard legends told among pilots and sailormen about the incredible riches of Portugal's secret empire in the East, how they had by now converted the heathens to Catholicism and so held them in bondage, where gold was as cheap as pig iron, and emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and sapphires as plentiful as pebbles on a beach.
If the Catholic part's true, he told himself, perhaps the rest is too.”

James Clavell book Shōgun

Source: Shōgun (1975), Ch. 1

Life , Parting

“In solitude it is possible to love mankind; in the world, for one who knows the world, there can be nothing but secret or open war.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Source: Persons and Places (1944), p. 159

Love , War , World , Solitude

“Therein lay the secret to all fads: the herd instinct. People wanted to look like everybody else. That was why they bought white bucks and pedal pushers and bikinis. But someone had to be the first one to wear platform shoes, to bob their hair, and that took the opposite of herd instinct.”

Connie Willis Bellwether

Source: Bellwether (1996), Chapter 2 “Bubblings”, Section 3 (p. 63)

People , Shoe

“I can now report that the mathematics of the multiple focus are a most improbable thicket, and the useful service I enforced upon what I must call an absurd set of contradictions is one of my secrets. I know that thousands of scientists, at home and abroad, are attempting to duplicate my work; they are welcome to the effort. None will succeed. Why do I speak so positively? That is my other secret.”

Jack Vance (1916–2013) American mystery and speculative fiction writer

Section 3 (p. 169)
Short fiction, Rumfuddle (1973)

Home , Mathematics , Effort

“Another window to the outside opened on the first day of school, when an eager young teacher told the class they could find out anything in the world if they paid attention and learned to read. To Jake it came as a revelation, the missing piece of the puzzle of his life! Here was the secret of existence he had known must be somewhere! All the mysteries of his existence would come clear, all the things he wondered about, if he would only learn to read. He did learn, quickly, passionately, with the ardor many boys reserve for sports.”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Source: Gibbon's Decline & Fall (1996), Chapter 2 (pp. 44-45)

Life , World , School , Boy

“Dogs howled, sensing the drama. Without Seriati(General), the president would never have left the country, it was a coup d’état … helped by secret outside influences.”

Leila Ben Ali (1956) Wife of Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali

23 June, 2012. Ben Ali’s wife blames general for Tunisia ‘coup d’état’ http://www.france24.com/en/20120623-ben-ali-wife-leila-blames-general-tunisia-coup-d-etat-saudi-arabia

Dogs , Sense , Help , Country

“I think,
Some shrewd man first, a man in judgment wise,
Found for mortals the fear of gods,
Thereby to frighten the wicked should they
Even act or speak or scheme in secret.”

Euripidés (-480–-406 BC) ancient Athenian playwright

Sisyphus, as translated by R. G. Bury, and revised by J. Garrett http://www.wku.edu/~jan.garrett/302/critias.htm
Variant translation: He was a wise man who originated the idea of God.

God , Fear , Thinking

“Yeah, I've been writing a bunch of new stuff, but it's all secret. In fact, I may or may not have been writing stuff this entire interview.”

Patrick Stump (1984) American musician

IMDb.com

“To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible, and promote the best interests of humanity.”

Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902) British businessman, mining magnate and politician in South Africa

1877 will, quoted in Cecil Rhodes by John Flint

War , World , Parting , Perfection

“The American dream is under attack because our government has been hijacked by the liberals in Washington, D. C. … They want you to believe that they're going to drag out enough prisoners and dead people to win the election. Well, let me tell you a little secret. Conservatives that are alive outnumber the dead people and prisoners. … I have a message for the political elites in Washington, D. C.: The United States of America is not going to become the United States of Europe, not on our watch.”

Herman Cain (1945) American writer, businessman and activist

[Tea Party speaker: 'Stupid people' running country, Dayton Daily News, 2010-10-15, Lynn, Hulsey, http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/dayton-news/tea-party-speaker-stupid-people-running-country-977298.html, 2011-10-08]

People , Dreams , Dead

“[I] decided to force myself to cut this golden knot of ambition [to portray the nobility any longer] in order to recover my liberty. Realizing that a retirement of this sort must be made while one is rising and not falling; that one must leave Fortune while she is still favorable... I seized the occasion of a short, secret journey to throw myself at Her Highness's feet and beg, as the sole reward for so many efforts, exemption from such [diplomatic] assignments and permission to serve her in my own home. This favor I obtained with more difficulty than any other she ever granted me... Now by God's grace.... I am leading a quiet life with my wife and children and have no pretensions in the world than to live in peace.”

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) Flemish painter

Quote in a letter to his friend Peiresc, 18 Dec. 1634; as cited by Simon Schrama, in Rembrandt's eyes, Alfred A. Knopf - Borzoi Books, New York 1999, p. 402
1625 - 1640

Life , God , Children , World

“Everybody’s got their differences
too bad
here’s a circumstance in which the stakes are high
everybody’s got their secrets out
so sad
go around the room and see who doesn’t cry Soon enough
you’ll be free to write it off
you don’t know enough
to call a bluff
and the one who does
will never ever tell”

Aimee Mann (1960) American indie rock singer-songwriter (born 1960)

"Soon Enough" · Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkjIoIhNDVY
Song lyrics, Charmer (2012)

Sadness , Cry

“We met in secret : mystery is to love
Like perfume to the flower; the maiden's blush
Looks loveliest when her cheek is pale with fear.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(18th May 1822) Poetic Sketches. Second Series - Sketch the Third. Rosalie
25th May 1822) St. George’s Hospital, Hyde Park Corner see The Improvisatrice (1824
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822

Love , Fear , Flowers

“The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Leo
1900s, Getting Married (1908)

Forgiveness , Understanding

“5184. To him, that you tell your Secret, you resign your Liberty.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Compare Poor Richard's Almanack (1737) : To whom thy secret thou dost tell, to him thy freedom thou dost sell.
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“If we except the great name of Newton (and the exception is one that the great Gauss himself would have been delighted to make) it is probable that no mathematician of any age or country has ever surpassed Gauss in the combination of an abundant fertility of invention with an absolute vigorousness in demonstration, which the ancient Greeks themselves might have envied. It may be admitted, without any disparagement to the eminence of such great mathematicians as Euler and Cauchy that they were so overwhelmed with the exuberant wealth of their own creations, and so fascinated by the interest attaching to the results at which they arrived, that they did not greatly care to expend their time in arranging their ideas in a strictly logical order, or even in establishing by irrefragable proof propositions which they instinctively felt, and could almost see to be true. With Gauss the case was otherwise. It may seem paradoxical, but it is probably nevertheless true that it is precisely the effort after a logical perfection of form which has rendered the writings of Gauss open to the charge of obscurity and unnecessary difficulty. The fact is that there is neither obscurity nor difficulty in his writings, as long as we read them in the submissive spirit in which an intelligent schoolboy is made to read his Euclid. Every assertion that is made is fully proved, and the assertions succeed one another in a perfectly just analogical order… But when we have finished the perusal, we soon begin to feel that our work is but begun, that we are still standing on the threshold of the temple, and that there is a secret which lies behind the veil and is as yet concealed from us. No vestige appears of the process by which the result itself was obtained, perhaps not even a trace of the considerations which suggested the successive steps of the demonstration. Gauss says more than once that for brevity, he gives only the synthesis, and suppresses the analysis of his propositions. Pauca sed matura—few but well matured… If, on the other hand, we turn to a memoir of Euler's, there is a sort of free and luxuriant gracefulness about the whole performance, which tells of the quiet pleasure which Euler must have taken in each step of his work; but we are conscious nevertheless that we are at an immense distance from the severe grandeur of design which is characteristic of all Gauss's greater efforts.”

Henry John Stephen Smith (1826–1883) mathematician

As quoted by Alexander Macfarlane, Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century (1916) p. 95, https://books.google.com/books?id=43SBAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA95 "Henry John Stephen Smith (1826-1883) A Lecture delivered March 15, 1902"

Pleasure , Age , Feeling , Intelligence

“Affected dispatch is one of the most dangerous things to business that can be. It is like that, which the physicians call predigestion, or hasty digestion; which is sure to fill the body full of crudities, and secret seeds of diseases. Therefore measure not dispatch, by the times of sitting, but by the advancement of the business.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Dispatch
Essays (1625)

Disease , Business , Time

“Attacks by poisoning are possibly even more common in Russia than assassinations by gunfire. Most famously, Alexander Litvinenko, a secret-police whistle-blower, was killed by polonium in London, in 2006. Last week, British newspapers reported that a Russian businessman who dropped dead while jogging in a London suburb in 2012 had been killed by a rare plant poison. He had been a key witness in a money-laundering case that had originally been exposed by the Moscow accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who was tortured to death, in 2009, in a Russian jail.”

Masha Gessen (1967) Russian-American journalist and activist

"Putin's Russia: Don't Walk, Don't Eat, and Don't Drink" http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/putins-russia-dont-walk-dont-eat-and-dont-drink?intcid=mod-yml (28 May 2015), The New Yorker.

Death , Money , Dead

“Joseph Knecht had often noticed that many schoolmates his own age, but even more the younger boys, liked him, sought his friendship, and moreover tended to let him dominate them. They asked him for advice, put themselves under his influence. Ever since, this experience had been repeated frequently. It had its pleasant and flattering side; it satisfied ambition and strengthened self-confidence. But it also had another, a dark and terrifying side. For there was something bad and unpalatable about the attitude one took toward these schoolmates so eager for advice, guidance, and an example, about the impulse to despise them for their lack of self-reliance and dignity, and about the occasional secret temptation to make them (at least in thought) into obedient slaves.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Friendship , Age , Confidence , Boy

“To leave out beautiful sunsets is the secret of good taste.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Simplicity http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21390/Simplicity
From the poems written in English

Beauty

“Everything is both a trap and a display; the secret reality of the object is what the Other makes of it.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Critique of Dialectical Reason

Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960)

Reality

“This is the secret of Christ's kingship— "He became obedient — wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him." And this is the secret of all obedience and all command. Obedience to a law above you subjugates minds to you who never would have yielded to mere will.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 437.

God , Law , Christ

“I am capable of projecting myself into my little inner cinema... I free myself through a secret exit from the attempts to encircle my soul.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980, Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali, p. unknown

Soul

“On December 22, 1986, finding I was body positive, I set myself a target: I would disclose my secret and survive Margaret Thatcher. I did. Now I have set my sights on the millennium and a world where we are all equal.”

Derek Jarman (1942–1994) British film director and artist

At Your Own Risk

World

“What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. […] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting through history on her secret tasks.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 154

Fear , History , Thinking

“Talk can neither be verified nor falsified in any rigorous sense. This is an open secret which hermeneutics and aesthetics, from Aristotle to Croce, have laboured to exorcise or to conceal from themselves and their clients. This ontological, which is to say both primordial and essential axiom (or platitude) of ineradicable undecidability needs, none the less, to be closely argued.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 2 (p. 61).

Sense

“This legible lesson, this ritual recording, must be repeated as often as possible; the punishments must be a school rather than a festival; an ever-open book rather than a ceremony. The duration that makes the punishment effective for the guilty is also useful for the spectators. They must be able to consult at each moment the permanent lexicon of crime and punishment. A secret punishment is a punishment half wasted. Children should be allowed to come to the places where the penalty is being carried out; there they will attend their classes in civics. And grown men will periodically relearn the laws. Let us conceive of places of punishment as a Garden of the Laws that families would visit on Sundays.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter Three, The Gentle Way in Punishment

Men , Children , Books , School

“Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Frost at Midnight

"Frost at Midnight", l. 72 (1798)

“Praise be to you, O hills, that you can breathe
Into our souls the secret of your power!”

Richard Hovey (1864–1900) American writer

"Comrades", p. 49.
Along the Trail (1898)

Soul

“To be identified with the public is the divine gift of the best-sellers in popular Romance and, no doubt, in popular realism. E. M. Forster once spoke of the novelist as sending down a bucket into the unconscious; the author of She installed a suction pump. He drained the whole reservoir of the public's secret desires. Critics speak of the reader suspending unbelief; the best-seller knows better; man is a believing animal.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

"Rider Haggard: Still Riding", p. 25
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)

Animals

“Perhaps the secret of being happy is about letting go of fear, embracing energy that enriches us. Ignoring those who drain us and diminish, channeling ourselves towards goodness and positive acts”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

All Will be Well (2004)

Fear , Happiness

“How great is the difference between The hidden child and the secret friend! For the friend makes only loving, Living but measured ascents toward God. But the child presses on to lose its own life upon the summits, in that simplicity which knoweth not itself.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

Evelyn Underhill Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness (1912), p. 433
The Sparkling Stone (c. 1340)

Love , Life , God

“Some tell me "Preach the pure gospel!" This reminds me that the Communist secret police also told me to preach Christ, but not to mention communism. Is it really so, that those who are for what is called "a pure gospel" are inspired by the same spirit as those of the Communist secret police?”

Richard Wurmbrand (1909–2001) Romanian Christian minister of Jewish descent

Source: Tortured For Christ (1967), p. 75.

Communication , Christ

“Bombardment by a new device of centres essential to the British war effort. The action was long delayed, but who can deny that the moment selected for it was chosen most appropriately from the military point of view? Germany has more secret weapons than one.”

William Joyce (1906–1946) British fascist and propaganda broadcaster

Broadcast, German European Service in English, 17 September 1944.
Refers to the first attack by the Vergeltungswaffe-1, or "reprisal weapon".

War , Effort

“America is a country with a First Amendment, and you're allowed to publish just about anything you want, as long as it's not real secret information. Of course, nobody really does that except for, you know, you guys in the media.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

2000s, Larry King Live (2000)

Guy , Country

“We have come here to learn about the creations, about God's secret, and about God's grace. We are the form of light. There are six kinds of lives and we are the form of light. We have come here to learn the sirr, the secret connection between ourselves and His power, to study our Father and the story of where we were before. Within this body, within this show, there is much we must learn. We have come here to learn, not to dance on this dramatic stage or to watch show after show. We have come here to open and look within everything and see our Father. Each thing that we enjoy or feel sorrow about must be opened, and we must see God within. That is the lesson we have come to learn.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

God , Feeling , Study , Light

“We venture to say a few words in explanation of the plan of this work. Its object is not to force upon the public the personal views or theories of its author; nor has it the pretensions of a scientific work, which aims at creating a revolution in some department of thought. It is rather a brief summary of the religions, philosophies, and universal traditions of human kind, and the exegesis of the same, in the spirit of those secret doctrines, of which none — thanks to prejudice and bigotry — have reached Christendom in so unmutilated a form, as to secure it a fair judgment. Since the days of the unlucky mediaeval philosophers, the last to write upon these secret doctrines of which they were the depositories, few men have dared to brave persecution and prejudice by placing their knowledge upon record. And these few have never, as a rule, written for the public, but only for those of their own and succeeding times who possessed the key to their jargon. The multitude, not understanding them or their doctrines, have been accustomed to regard them en masse as either charlatans or dreamers. Hence the unmerited contempt into which the study of the noblest of sciences — that of the spiritual man — has gradually fallen.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Introduction
Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I

Men , Religion , Understanding , Knowledge

“There was a time when religion was kept secret from popular belief within the mystery cults like a holy fire, sharing a common sanctuary with philosophy. The legends of antiquity name the earliest philosophers as the originators of these mystery cults, from which the most enlightened among the later philosophers, notably Plato, liked to educe their divine teachings. At that time philosophers still had the courage and the right to discuss the singly great themes, the only ones worthy of philosophizing and rising above common knowledge. P. 7”

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) German philosopher (idealism)

Philosophy and Religion 1804)

Education , Religion , Courage , Knowledge

“This was a secret meeting on a secret tour which nobody is supposed to know about. It means that there are men, and perhaps women, in this country walking around with eggs in their pockets, just on the off-chance of seeing the Prime Minister.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Remarks to the press after Harold Wilson was hit by eggs thrown by demonstrators on two successive days (1 June 1970), quoted in Edward Heath, The Course of My Life (Hodder and Stoughton, 1998), p. 305.
Leader of the Opposition

Women , Men , Chance , Country

“The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.”

Karen Blixen book Last Tales

"The Cardinal's Third Tale"
Last Tales (1957)

“Frank Harris has no feelings. It is the secret of his success. Just as the fact that he thinks other people have none either is the secret of the failure that lies in wait for him somewhere on the way of Life.”

Frank Harris (1856–1931) Irish journalist and rogue

Oscar Wilde, letter to More Adey, May 12, 1897, quoted in Hugh Kingsmill Frank Harris (1932) p. 102.
Criticism

Life , People , Way , Feeling

“Vereker’s secret, my dear man — the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

The Figure in the Carpet http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext96/fgcpt10h.htm (1896).

Books

“The secret of success behind all men of achievement, lies in the faculty of applying their intellect in all their activities, without being mislead by any surging emotions or feelings. The secret of success in life lies in keeping the head above the storms of the heart.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

Life , Men , Feeling , Success

“These are weighty secrets, and we must whisper them.”

Sarah Chauncey Woolsey (1835–1905) writer

Secrets.

“There are some occasions in which a man must tell half his secret, in order to conceal the rest; but there is seldom one in which a man should tell all. Great skill is necessary to know how far to go, and where to stop.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters

15 January 1753
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

“There are those whose purpose in writing is, by means of the noble qualities of heart which their imagination invents or which they themselves may have, to seek the plaudits of other human beings. For my part, I use my genius to depict the delights of cruelty: delights which are not transitory or artificial; but which began with man and will end with him. Cannot genius be allied with cruelty in the secret resolutions of Providence? Or can one, being cruel, not have genius?”

Comte de Lautréamont book Les Chants de Maldoror

Les Chants de Maldoror

Imagination , Heart , Parting

“I'm not logical. I'm infected with the romantic fever. It began in my teens when I read Baudelaire in secret, in a country boarding school in England from which I slipped away by climbing over the wall. I was fifteen, the same age as Juliet--a Juliet for whom Romeo had no attraction.”

Renée Vivien (1877–1909) British poet who wrote in the French language

Quoted in Mercure de France, I-XII (1953), trans. Jeannette H. Foster (1977)

Age , School , Reading , Country

“The fact was that he suffered from an incurable malady which, it seemed, attacked only Homo sapiens among all the intelligent races of the universe. That disease was religious mania.
Throughout the earlier part of its history, the human race had brought forth an endless succession of prophets, seers, messiahs, and evangelists who convinced themselves and their followers that to them alone were the secrets of the universe revealed. Some of them succeeded in establishing religions which survived for many generations and influenced billions of men; others were forgotten even before their deaths.
The rise of science, which with monotonous regularity refuted the cosmologies of the prophets and produced miracles which they could never match, eventually destroyed all these faiths. It did not destroy the awe, not the reverence and humility, which all intelligent beings felt as they contemplated the stupendous universe in which they found themselves. What it did weaken, and finally obliterate, were the countless religions, each of which claimed with unbelievable arrogance, that it was the sole repository of the truth and that its millions of rivals and predecessors were all mistaken.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The City and the Stars

Source: The City and the Stars (1956), Chapter 13 (p. 99)

Death , Men , Truth , Disease

“The discourse of truth is quite simply impossible. It eludes itself. Everything eludes itself, everything scoffs at its own truth, seduction renders everything elusive. The fury to unveil the truth, to get at the naked truth, the one which haunts all discourses of interpretation, the obscene rage to uncover the secret, is proportionate to the impossibility of ever achieving this. …But this rage, this fury, only bears witness to the eternity of seduction and to the impossibility of mastering it.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

Source: 1980s, The Ecstasy of Communication (1987), p. 73

Truth , Rage

“To cut and tighten sentences is the secret of mastery.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Simplicity http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21390/Simplicity
From the poems written in English

“I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity — it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.”

Norman Mailer book An American Dream

Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 5
An American Dream (1965)

“I will take his secret to the grave, telling people along the way. Betrayal is no sin if it is whimsical.”

Tom Stoppard The Invention of Love

Housman, Act I
The Invention of Love (1997)

People , Way , Betrayal

“Still, slavery professes only to wish its rights. It only wants to be let alone. Of course, what else could it want? And what else is the secret of the present state of the country? Under the plea of being let alone — that it was a dreadful thing and only wanted to mind its own business — it has quietly possessed itself, one after another, of all the outworks of the Constitution, and now seeks to intrench itself finally in the citadel.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Business , Country

“You ask for her secret, though you might not know that's what you're about; and she can't tell you without learning it herself. And she wants not to learn that secret.”

John Crowley book Engine Summer

Engine Summer (1979), chapter 3.2

Learning

“Thanks to technology, what almost anybody can do has been multiplied a thousandfold, and our moral understanding about what we ought to do hasn't kept pace. … You can have a test-tube baby or take a morning-after pill to keep from having a baby; you can satisfy your sexual urges in the privacy of your room by downloading Internet pornography, and you can keep your favorite music for free instead of buying it; you can keep your money in secret offshore bank accounts and purchase stock in cigarette companies that are exploiting impoverished Third World countries; and you can lay minefields, smuggle nuclear weapons in suitcases, make nerve gas, and drop "smart bombs" with pinpoint accuracy. Also, you can arrange to have a hundred dollars a month automatically sent from your bank account to provide education for ten girls in an Islamic country who otherwise would not learn to read and write, or to benefit a hundred malnourished people, or provide medical care for AIDS sufferers in Africa. You can use the Internet to organize citizen monitoring of environmental hazards, or to check the honesty and performance of government officials — or to spy on your neighbors. Now, what ought we to do?”

Daniel Dennett book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Breaking the Spell (2006)

Money , People , World , Education

“They crossed the wood and hanged him
A long time ago
They still misunderstand him
Those who don’t know
And in the evening his love will lead the blind
In every secret corner there in your mind”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Jesus
Song lyrics, Buddha and the Chocolate Box (1974)

Love , Time

“Many of us are gravely suspicious about the influence of freemasonry. I am utterly opposed to it and to the influence of other secret organisations because I believe them to be a deeply corrupting influence on society. That influence has been highlighted by the case of Chief Inspector Woollard who investigated allegations of incompetence and misconduct by a building contractor working for the London borough of Islington. During his investigation, he discerned considerable masonic influence among officials in the company and in the local authority. As he came closer to concluding that the influence of freemasonry in the administration of the contract had been great, he was removed from the case and sent to the Metropolitan police's equivalent of running a power station in Siberia. Masonic influence is serious…We need a clear statement from the Home Secretary an which he makes it clear that he opposes masonic influences of any sort and that police officers should be asked to sign a declaration of interests and membership of organisations such as many local authority officers and councillors are asked to sign, Freemasonry is incompatible with being a police officer.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1988/jun/24/policing-london in the House of Commons (24 June 1988).
1980s

Home

“[There still remains the question whether] he who discovers a new world in the depths of the invisible would not do wisely to plant on it a flag known to himself alone, and, like Achilles, "devour his heart in secret;" whether the greatest problems which have ever been guessed on earth had not better have remained buried in the brain which had found the key to them, and whether the deepest thinkers — those whose hand has been boldest in drawing aside the veil, and their eye keenest in fathoming the mysteries beyond it — had not better, like the prophetess of Ilion, have kept for heaven, and heaven only, secrets and mysteries which human tongue cannot truly express, nor human intelligence conceive.”

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881) Swiss philosopher and poet

Review of L'Art Chrétien by Alexis-François Rio in the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève. (1842)
Journal Intime (1882), Quotes used in the Introduction by Ward

World , Intelligence , Question , Problem

“Infernal gods, who rule the shades below,
Chaos and Phlegethon, the realms of woe;
Grant what I've heard I may to light expose,
Secrets which earth, and night, and hell inclose!”

Christopher Pitt (1699–1748) English poet

Richard Maitland, 4th Earl of Lauderdale, The Works of Virgil, Translated Into English Verse (1709), Aeneid, Book VI, lines 328–331, p. 210
Misattributed

God , Hell , Light , Night

“Frank II liked Spain. Philip's capital was gayer, warmer, and more sanitary than London. It was intoxicating to enjoy the best of both courts. It proved also extremely remunerative: the shared consciousness of Frank I and II was by far the quickest communicational link between the two rival countries, and as such was worth money. Not that Frank revealed his secret to a soul, but he let it be known he had a fleet of capable spies who moved without risk of detection between England and Spain. Burly Lord Burleigh beamed upon him. So did the Duke of Medina Sidonia.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Let's Be Frank (1957)

Money , Soul , Communication , Country

“Yet scientists are required to back up their claims not with private feelings but with publicly checkable evidence. Their experiments must have rigorous controls to eliminate spurious effects. And statistical analysis eliminates the suspicion (or at least measures the likelihood) that the apparent effect might have happened by chance alone.Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions. This is why the £740,000 reward of James Randi, offered to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls, is safe. Why don't the television editors insist on some equivalently rigorous test? Could it be that they believe the alleged paranormal powers would evaporate and bang go the ratings?Consider this. If a paranormalist could really give an unequivocal demonstration of telepathy (precognition, psychokinesis, reincarnation, whatever it is), he would be the discoverer of a totally new principle unknown to physical science. The discoverer of the new energy field that links mind to mind in telepathy, or of the new fundamental force that moves objects around a table top, deserves a Nobel prize and would probably get one. If you are in possession of this revolutionary secret of science, why not prove it and be hailed as the new Newton? Of course, we know the answer. You can't do it. You are a fake.Yet the final indictment against the television decision-makers is more profound and more serious. Their recent splurge of paranormalism debauches true science and undermines the efforts of their own excellent science departments. The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudo-scientific charlatans. The public appetite for wonder can be fed, through the powerful medium of television, without compromising the principles of honesty and reason.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

[Human gullibility beyond belief,— the “paranormal” in the media, The Sunday Times, 1996-08-25]

Truth , Feeling , Decision , Effort

“Our political tradition sets great store by the generalized symbol of evil. This is the wrongdoer whose wrongdoing will be taken by the public to be the secret propensity of a whole community or class.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter VIII https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Aftermath II, Section IV, p 154
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

Communication , Evil

“It is often said that if slaughterhouses were made of glass, most people would be vegetarians. If the general public knew what went on inside animal experimentation laboratories, they would be abolished. However, the parallel is not exact. Slaughterhouses are invisible because the public wants them that way. Everyone knows what goes on inside them; they simply do not want to be confronted with it. Most people do not know what goes on with animal experimentation. Slaughterhouses allow visits. Laboratories where animal experiments are performed are secretive. Perhaps those who conduct the experiments know they would be stopped if what they do were known even by other scientists. Perhaps they are ashamed.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson book When Elephants Weep

Conclusion, pp. 216-217
When Elephants Weep (1994)

People , Way , Animals

“He sows June fields with clover, and the world
Broadcasts with little common kindnesses.
The plain good souls He sends us, who fulfill
Life's homely duties in the daily path
With cheerful heart, ambitious of no more
Than to supply the wants of friend and kin,
Yet serve God's higher love to human hearts;
Giving a secret sweetness to the home,
The hidden fragrance of a kindly heart,
The simple beauty of a useful life,
That never dazzles, and that never tires.”

Samuel Longfellow (1819–1892) American clergyman

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 544.

Love , Life , God , World

“I want to tell you why I did this. My mother was the first one to tell me about the Statue of Liberty. She saw at first from the deck of the ship that brought her to America: she was an immigrant. She impressed upon me how precious our liberty is and how easily it can be lost. And then one day it occurred to me that I could show with magic how we take our freedom for granted. Sometimes we don't realize how important something is until it's gone. So I asked our government for permission to let me make the Statue of Liberty disappear… just for a few minutes. I thought that if we faced emptiness where, for as long as we can remember, that great lady is, lifted up our land, why then… we might imagine what the world would be like without liberty and we realize how precious our freedom really is. And then I will make the Statue of Liberty reappear, by remembering the world that made it appear in the first place. The world is freedom. Freedom is the true magic. It's beyond the power of any magician. But wherever one human being guarantees another the same rights he or she enjoys, we find freedom. [The curtain between the live audience and the Statue of Liberty used to hide the secret of its disappearance is raised] How long can we stay free? But just as long as we keep thinking, and speaking, and acting as free human beings. Our ancestors just couldn’t. We can. And I will show you the way. Nooooow!”

David Copperfield (1956) American illusionist

The curtain is lowered and the Statue of Liberty reappears
From "The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears" (April 8th, 1983)

World , Way , Imagination , Thinking

“But there are still many unanswered questions. The halo that surrounds our Galaxy is one mystery region… The centre of the Galaxy hides even more secrets.”

Heather Couper (1949) astronomer

in "Who Discovered the Galaxy - Presidential Address – 1985" http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1986JBAA...96..284C, Heather Couper, British Astron. Assoc. Journal V. 96, No. 5 (1986), p. 293, Bibliographic Code: 1986JBAA...96..284C

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