Quotes about secrets (2118 quotes, page 15)

“The Bible is a treasure. It contains enough to make us rich for time and eternity. It contains the secret of happy living. It contains the key of heaven. It contains the title-deeds of an inheritance incorruptible, and that fadeth not away. It contains the pearl of great price. Nay, in so far as it reveals them as the portion of us sinful worms, it contains the Saviour and the living God Himself.”

James Hamilton (1814–1867) Scottish minister and a prolific author of religious tracts

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 30.

God , Time , Happiness

“The whole secret of the campaigns unleashed against Spain can be explained in two words: Masonry and Communism… we have to extirpate these two evils from our land.”

Francisco Franco (1892–1975) Spanish general and dictator

Writing under the alias Jakin Boor in the journal Arriba in an article, "Masonry and Communism" (14 December 1946), as quoted in Franco: A Biography by Juan Pablo Fusi Aizpurúạ, p. 71

Communication , Evil

“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 (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing

Cassandra (1860)

Family , Food , Feeling , Nature

“That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit's motive,
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,
The secret life of belly and bone.”

Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) American poet

"The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me" http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-heavy-bear-who-goes-with-me/
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)

Life , Stupidity , Motivation , Animals

“I have heard that you have found the secret of engraving on copper on white ground, as Elsheimer did. To bite the plate with acid, he covered the copper with a white paste. He then drew with the point down to the metal, which is of reddish color, and it looked as if he were drawing with red crayon on white paper. I cannot remember the composition of this write paste, although he communicated it to me.”

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) Flemish painter

Quote of Rubens in a letter to Pieter van Veen, 19 June 1622, as cited
1605 - 1625
Source: http://remdoc.huygens.knaw.nl/#/document/remdoc/e12885

Color , Communication , Past , Drawing

“Our most terrifying fears and our innermost secret desires for extermination are reflected in this elegant and profound book, without any sort of leniency to attenuate the disgust and hopelessness we feel when faced with a humanity constantly atrophied by a series of values and practices that lead to chaos.”

Albert Caraco (1919–1971) French-Uruguayan philosopher

Albert Caraco, Rodrigo Santos Rivera. Breviario del caos Editorial Sexto Piso, 2006. Editorial text
Original: En este pequeño libro escrito con elegancia y profundidad vemos reflejados nuestros más terribles temores y nuestros más inconfesados deseos de exterminio, sin ningún tipo de lenitivo que pudiera atenuar el asco y la desesperanza frente a una humanidad cada vez más atrofiada por una serie de valores y prácticas que irremediablemente se dirigen al caos.

Books , Fear , Feeling

“He knows, of course, that a criminal organization like the Verbover ring can’t flourish without the ready services of bagman and secret lobbyists, without regular applications of grease and body English to the works of government.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 12

“Ophelia's mind went wandering
you'd wonder where she'd gone
through secret doors
down corridors
she'd wander them alone”

Natalie Merchant (1963) American singer-songwriter

Song lyrics, Ophelia (1998), Ophelia

“A year ago on this day around 9:45 a. m. you came downstairs dressed in an orange Korean dress and we left together for the ceremonies. You were leaving the Blue House for the last time in your life. This day a year ago was the longest of my life, the most painful and sad. My mind went blank with grief and despair. I felt as though I had lost everything in the world. All things became a burden and I lost my courage and will. A year has passed since then. And during that year I have cried alone in secret too many times to count.”

Park Chung-hee (1917–1979) Korean Army general and the leader of South Korea from 1961 to 1979

Diary entry (15 August 1975), as quoted in The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Revised and Updated http://books.google.com/books?id=yJZKpYXh2SAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Two+Koreas:+A+Contemporary+History+revised+updated&hl=en&sa=X&ei=X-xvU5TRFPOisQSa34CIBA&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=already%20into%20the%20last%20week&f=false (2001), by Don Oberdorfer, p. 56.
1970s

Life , Pain , World , Sadness

“To expect to be kissed having bad breath is the secret of a fool.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

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

Fools , Kiss

“I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics: Plagiarize!
Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize…
Only be sure always to call it please "research."”

Tom Lehrer (1928) American singer-songwriter and mathematician

"Lobachevsky"
Songs by Tom Lehrer (1953)

Mathematics , Success , Forgetting

“Government want to tell you things you can't say because they're against the law, or you can't say this because it's against a regulation, or here's something you can't say because its a… secret; "You can't tell him that because he's not cleared to know that." Government wants to control information and control language because that's the way you control thought, and basically that's the game they're in.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Doin' It Again, Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics (1990)

Law , Way , Game

“4912. There is no Man so bad, but has a secret Respect for the good.”

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

Compare Poor Richard's Almanack (1747) : There is no Man so bad, but he secretly respects the good.
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“In order to spare you any further repulsion, it would be best not to mention any of the unpleasant details of this story, particularly a secret message, a toboggan, a deceitful trap, a swarm of snow gnats, a scheming villain, a troupe of organized youngsters, a covered casserole dish, and a surprising survivor of a terrible fire.”

Daniel Handler book The Slippery Slope

The Slippery Slope (2003)

“This is where we get into the information war - that speculative blood became more important than the actual blood. We already can see all that terrible stuff – we know about that. Let's focus on your nightmares, how all these people might die because the government's secrets have been unleashed.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Attributed, "We Steal Secrets" 2013 Movie

War , People

“Trotsky's writings and those of his followers were freely published in the middle and late thirties by the Hearst Press in America. His works on his "new kind of Communism" were published by the Franco Press at Salamanca and Burgos. The secret police of the Polish dictatorship were specially educated in Trotskyism in order to facilitate their work of espionage and disruption inside the Polish working-class movement.”

James Klugmann (1912–1977) British writer

From Trotsky to Tito (1951)

Education , Communication

“Lincoln seemed to me to be familiar with the name, character, and reputation of every officer of rank in the army and navy, and appeared to understand them better than some whose business it was to do so; he had many a good story to tell of nearly all, and if he could have lived to write the anecdotes of the war, I am sure he would have furnished the most readable book of the century. To me he was one of the most interesting men I ever met; he had an originality about him which was peculiarly his own, and one felt, when with him, as if he could confide his dearest secret to him with absolute security against its betrayal. There, it might be said, was 'God's noblest work an honest man,' and such he was, all through. I have not a particle of the bump of veneration on my head, but I saw more to admire in this man, more to reverence, than I had believed possible; he had a load to bear that few men could carry, yet he traveled on with it, foot-sore and weary, but without complaint; rather; on the contrary, cheering those who would faint on the roadside. He was not a demonstrative man, so no one will ever know, amid all the trials he underwent, how much he had to contend with, and how often he was called upon to sacrifice his own opinions to those of others, who, he felt, did not know as much about matters at issue as he did himself. When he did surrender, it was always with a pleasant manner, winding up with a characteristic story.”

David Dixon Porter (1813–1891) United States Navy admiral

Source: 1880s, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), p. 283

Men , God , War , Books

“O, lonely tomb in Moab's land,
O, dark Bethpeor's hill,
Speak to these curious hearts of ours,
And teach them to be still!
God hath His mysteries of grace —

Ways that we cannot tell;
He hides them deep, like the secret sleep,

Of him He loved so well.”

Cecil Frances Alexander (1818–1895) British hymn-writer and poet

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 280.

Love , God , Way , Sleep

“The dinner that evening was dreadful, the epitome of English vacuity…they were all the same, each mind set in the same weird armour, like an archosaur’s ruff, like a fringe of icicles. All I heard the whole evening was the tinkle of broken ice-needles as people tried timidly and vainly to reach through the stale fence of words, tinkle, tinkle, and then withdraw. Nobody behaved with breadth, with warmth, with naturalness, and finally it became pathetic. We were all the same; I hardly said anything, but that made me no more innocent – or less conditioned. The solemn figures of the Old Country, the Queen, the Public School, Oxbridge, the Right Accent, People Like Us, stood around the table like secret police, ready to crush down in an instant on any attempt at an intelligent European humanity.* We…were held by those cloud-grey shapes on the world’s blue rim. Death machines holding thousands of gum-chewing, contraceptive-carrying men; for some reason more 30 years away than 30 miles; as if we were looking into the future, not the south; into a world where there were no more Prosperos, no private domains, no Poetries, fantasies, tender sexual promises…I felt acutely the fragility of time itself…”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Death , Men , People , World

“I'll clue you in on a secret: death is not the worst thing that could happen to you. I know we think that; we are the first society ever to think that. It's not worse than dishonor; it's not worse than losing your freedom; its not worse than losing a sense of personal responsibility.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Be More Cynical (2000)

Death , Thinking , Sense , Freedom

“There are two ways of confronting the country's problems. One is through a management style based on adventurism, instability, play-acting, exaggerations, wrongdoing, being secretive, self-importance, superficiality and ignoring the law. The second way is based on realism, respect, openness, collective wisdom and avoiding extremism.”

Mir-Hossein Mousavi (1941) Iranian politician and architect

As quoted in "Ahmadinejad lashes out at Iran's ex-presidents", CNN (4 June 2009) http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/06/03/iran.election.debate/index.html

Wisdom , Law , Way , Problem

“[Issam al-]Sartawi and I are sitting in a small restaurant on the Boulevard St. Germain. After the main course, he excuses himself. 'I have to go to the bathroom. Keep an eye on my briefcase.' His attaché case - the kind Israelis call James Bond cases - stands under the table. After a few minutes he comes back, takes his seat and bursts out laughing. 'If I told anyone of my friends that I left a briefcase full of PLO secrets in the care of a Zionist, they wouldn't believe me', he says. 'If I tell anyone of my friends that a PLO terrorist put an attaché case under my table and went away, and I remained there, they'd think that I was crazy', I reply. We laugh and order a dessert.”

Uri Avnery (1923–2018) Israeli writer

My Friend, the Enemy (1986) - page 128

Thinking

“The Prime Minister spent a lot of time painting to you a lurid picture of what would happen under a Labour Government in pursuit of what he called a Continental conception. He has forgotten that Socialist theory was developed by Robert Owen in Britain long before Karl Marx. He has forgotten that Australia, New Zealand, whose peoples have played so great a part in the war, and the Scandinavian countries have had Socialist Governments for years, to the great benefit of their peoples, with none of those dreadful consequences…When he talks of the danger of a secret police…he forgets that these things were actually experienced in this country only under the Tory Government of Lord Liverpool in the years of repression when the British people who had saved Europe from Napoleon were suffering deep distress. He has forgotten many things, including, when he talks of the danger of Labour mismanaging finance, his own disastrous record at the Exchequer over the gold standard.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast (5 June 1945), quoted in The Times (6 June 1945), p. 2. Churchill had claimed in broadcast that a Labour government would have to rely on a Gestapo to carry out socialist policies
Leader of the Opposition

War , People , Suffering , Time

“He says it's a secret plan, but the only secret is that he has no plan.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), First presidential debate (September 26, 2016)

“I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

Life , People , Naivety

“Ambition raises a secret tumult in the soul, it inflames the mind, and puts it into a violent hurry of thought.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 256 (24 December 1711)
The Spectator (1711–1714)

Soul

“In spite of ferocious differences of opinion about other moral issues, there seems to be something approaching consensus that it is cruel and malicious to interfere with the life-enhancing illusions of others —unless those illusions are themselves the cause of of even greater ills. The disagreements come over what these greater ills might be- and this has led to the break down of the whole rationale. Keeping secrets from people for their own good can often be wise, but it takes only one person to give away a secret, and since there are disagreements about which cases warrant discretion, the result is an unsavory miasma of hypocrisy, lies, and frantic but fruitless attempts at distraction.”

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

Breaking the Spell (2006)

Life , People , Personality

“In early October of 1939, designated by the government as the year of "the duty to be healthy," Hitler authored a secret memo certifying that "Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr Brandt are hereby commissioned to allow certain specified doctors to grant a mercy death [Gnadentod] to patients judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination."”

Robert N. Proctor (1954) American historian

Source: Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, 1988, p. 177

Death

“Among the Romans in Christian times Mithras-worship as very widely spread, and so late as the Middle Ages we meet with a secret Mithras-worship ostensibly connected with the order of the Knights-Templars. Mithras thrusting the knife into the neck of the ox is a figurative representation belonging essentially to the cult of Mithras, of which examples have been frequently found in Europe.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Lectures on the philosophy of religion, together with a work on the proofs of the existence of God. Vol 2 Translated from the 2d German ed. 1895 Ebenezer Brown Speirs 1854-1900, and J Burdon Sanderson p. 81-82
Lectures on Philosophy of Religion, Volume 2

Age , Time

“Bush, a technical advisor to Roosevelt, published in 1945 an article in Atlantic Monthly which highlighted problems in the growth of knowledge, and proposed a technological solution based on his concept of memex, a multimedia personal computer: "Professionally, our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose…The difficulty seems to be not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record." (Bush, 1945) The world brain has continued for over fifty years to provide an active objective for the information systems community (Goodman, 1987), and memex is often quoted as having been realized fifty years later through the World Wide Web”

Brian R. Gaines (1938) British computer scientist

Berners-Lee, Cailliau, Luotonen, Nielsen and Secret, 1994
First paragraph
Convergence to the Information Highway (1996)

World , Quotes , Communication , Knowledge

“The principle is simple and powerful enough to be Marvin's Fourth Great Secret: If what they've been doing hasn't solved the problem, tell them to do something else.”

Gerald M. Weinberg (1933–2018) American computer scientist

Source: The secrets of consulting, 1985, p. 41

Problem

“That charm of genius, triumph of high art;
Poetry's divination, which reveals
All nature's secrets, such as influence
The heart of man.”

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

Translations, From the French

Art , Nature , Heart

“In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness.”

Sarah Orne Jewett book The Country of the Pointed Firs

Source: The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Ch. 15

Life , Happiness

“The title No Logo is not meant to be read as a literal slogan (as in No More Logos!), or a post-logo logo (there is already a No Logo clothing line, or so I'm told). Rather, it is an attempt to capture an Anticorporate attitude I see emerging among many young activists. This book is hinged on a simple hypothesis: that as more people discover the brand-name secrets of the global logo web, their outrage will fuel the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations, particularly those with very high name-brand recognition.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

Introduction, "A Web of Brands"
No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies 1999

People , Books , Reading , Clothes

“Life begins perpetually. Gathered together at last under the leadership of man, the student-teacher of the universe… unified, disciplined, armed with the secret powers of the atom, and with knowledge as yet beyond dreaming, Life, forever dying to be born afresh, forever young and eager, will presently stand upon this earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out its realm amidst the stars.”

H. G. Wells book The Outline of History

Source: The Outline of History (1920), Ch. 41

Life , Dreams , Star , Knowledge

“The revelation of the secret of water will put an end to all manner of speculation or expediency and their excrescences, to which belong war, hatred, impatience and discord of every kind. The thorough study of water therefore signifies the end of monopolies, the end of all domination in the truest sense of the word and the start of a socialism arising from the development of individualism in its most perfect form.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Implosion Magazine, No. 6, p. 29 (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine

War , Sense , Study , Water

“The higher dimension of religion has also always been practiced by a relatively few uncommon individuals. Indeed, it was largely the response to the more conventional or superficial aspects of such extraordinary personalities that produced the great cultic movements of exoteric religion among the masses. But such cultic movements are created by and designed for the instruction and social improvement of ordinary people, not men and women of the more highly evolved or awakened type. Therefore, alongside the development of exoteric religions there have always been secret societies and esoteric groups founded on practice of higher personal, moral, and biologically evolutionary disciplines.”

Adi Da Samraj (1939–2008) American writer

http://www.aboutadidam.org/relationship/secret.html

Women , People , Religion , Personality

“I heard the voices of the trees; the surprises of their movements. Their varieties of form and even their peculiarity of attraction toward the light had suddenly revealed to me the language of the forest. All that world of flora lived as mutes, whose signs I divined, whose passions I discovered. I wished to converse with them and to be able to say to myself, through that other language, painting, that I had put my finger upon the secret of their grandeur.”

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) French painter (1812-1867)

quote from a talk between Th. Rousseau and Alfred Sensier, 1850's; as cited in Barbizon days, Millet-Corot-Rousseau-Barye by Charles Sprague Smith, A. Wessels Company, New York, July 1902, p. 147
Alfred Sensier frequently visited the studio of Th. Rousseau (and Millet) and wrote later a book about both artists
1851 - 1867

World , Tree , Light , Passion

“I do not agree with Goethe, who says that every man has that hidden in the secret recesses of his bosom, which, if known, would cause his fellow men to turn from him with hatred; on the contrary, I firmly believe that were the workings of the heart known, they would rather win for us favour and affection.”

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

Literary Remains

Men , Heart

“A system must be managed. It will not manage itself. Left to themselves in the Western world, components become selfish, competitive, independent profit centres, and thus destroy the system.... The secret is cooperation between components toward the aim of the organization. We can not afford the destructive effect of competition.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (1993)

World , Selfishness

“Young people wonder how the adult world can be so boring. The secret is that it is not boring to adults because they have learned to enjoy simple things like covert malice at one another's expense. This is why they talk so much about the value of human understanding and sympathy - it has a certain rarity value in their world.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

Advice to Clever Children (1981)

People , World , Understanding , Learning

“I'm from a land called secret Estonia
Nobody knows where it's at”

Kerli (1987) Estonian singer

Creepshow
Love is Dead (2008)

“Thus the period we are studying is remarkable for achieving, not merely the right of free alienation of land, but also the right of alienation by secret conveyance. The latter achievement we may sometimes regret; but it was, probably, necessary for the complete emancipation of land from its its ancient tribal and feudal bonds.”

Edward Jenks (1861–1939) British legal scholar

Source: A Short History Of The English Law (First Edition) (1912), Chapter VIII, Methods Of Alienation, p. 122

Study

“Now it is certain.
There is no magic stone.
No secret to be found.
One must go
With the mind's winnowed learning.”

Eugene McCarthy (1916–2005) American politician

"Courage After Sixty"
Poems

Learning

“A very interesting report on the London property market as a refuge for secret assets and dirty money – published in March 2015 by Transparency UK – spoke of money coming from corruption or corrupt individuals, without ever mentioning the word “”; nor did it ever mention “organised crime”. The reason is simple: with the exception of a few very rare cases, in the UK the mafia is not something that you can see or hear. There aren’t dead bodies on the streets, or shootings. In Mexico or in Italy, between corpses, blood and drug seizures it’s impossible to think that the Mafia doesn’t exist. In Italy and in Mexico Mafia is loud and it smells of blood. In London, as in Paris, it exists, but it’s quiet, it acts in the dark. And most of all it doesn’t have the pungent smell of blood, but the reassuring smell of money. It’s not true that money doesn’t smell, it does smell indeed, but you definitely can’t rely on your sense of smell to identify criminal money.”

Roberto Saviano (1979) Italian journalist, writer and essayist

Dirty Money in London event (2016)

Money , Thinking , Sense , Dead

“A man's most open actions have a secret side to them.”

Joseph Conrad book Under Western Eyes

Pt. I, ch. 2
Under Western Eyes (1911)

“For if art, like religion, belongs to no country, it is perhaps itself the only country and the only true religion. Only those hear its call who have that siren’s song within them. The inner riches of the eyes bring out the secret virtues of the work, and little by little they begin to speak… Every artist, every work of every artist, establishes, in his or its own absolutely inaccessible way, this contact of the spirit with the spirit. Provided of course, that the viewer is in 'a state of grace.”

Michel Seuphor (1901–1999) designer, draughtsman, painter

Source: Abstract Painting (1964), p. 104

Religion , Art , Way , Country

“The secret of Hegel's dialectic lies ultimately in this alone, that it negates theology through philosophy in order then to negate philosophy through theology. Both the beginning and the end are constituted by theology; philosophy stands in the middle as the negation of the first positedness, but the negation of the negation is again theology. At first everything is overthrown, but then everything is reinstated in its old place, as in Descartes. The Hegelian philosophy is the last grand attempt to restore a lost and defunct Christianity through philosophy, and, of course, as is characteristic of the modern era, by identifying the negation of Christianity with Christianity itself.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Part II, Section 21
Principles of Philosophy of the Future http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/future/index.htm (1843)

“We rub the darkness from our eyes,
And face our thousand devious secret mornings...
And do not see how the pale mist, slowly ascending,
Shaped by the sun, shines like a white-robed dreamer
Compassionate over our towers bending.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Sun

“If there is a true secret to the universe, it is this…these first few seconds of warmth and entry and complete acceptance by one’s beloved.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 25 (p. 531)

Universe

“To write good poems is the secret of brevity.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

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

“While it is true that the white race exhibits some qualities of superiority over any other, we are to remember that there are wide differences in the same Caucasian (Semitic and Aryan) family; and also we should remember that some of the qualities which have given this branch of the human family its preeminence in the world are not such as can be pointed to as in all respects admirable…
The secret of the greater intelligence and aptitude of the Caucasian undoubtedly in great measure is to be attributed to the commingling of blood amongst its various branches; and this was evidently forced in large measure by circumstances under divine control.”

Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916) Founder of the Bible Student Movement

Zion's Watch Tower (July 15, 1902), pp. 215-216.

World , Family , Intelligence

“…there'd also been an unvarnished honestly in what they'd said. There were no hidden meanings, no secret attempts to pass judgment; as quickly as their disagreements had flared up, they'd pass.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Amanda Collier Ridley, Chapter 12, p. 183
2009, The Best of Me (2011)

“Satan has got a plan; and God has got a plan. God's plan is to fill his creation with people who obey his laws, live in peace, use the preaching of his Word to win souls, and go to live with Him in Heaven. Satan's plan is to reduce the population to zero. He hates humanity, exactly the opposite of Christianity. He wants to promise secret knowledge so that: "you can learn something that nobody else knows." That's what all the lodges promise too, by the way - some kind of secret knowledge. Use the teaching of evolution to get people to accomplish his goals and have people go to hell forever. Satan wants to reduce the population. The Bible says, "All things were created by him, and for him." God made a beautiful planet, beautiful garden and said, "Hey, fill it with people." First thing he said to Adam, was a blessing. "Be fruitful, multiply, replenish the earth." Go fill it up. It's a blessing. This is the first mention of the word, "blessing."”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

"Blessed."
Creation seminars (2003-2005), The dangers of evolution

God , Hate , People , Peace

“Over the postwar years, we have granted to the elite and secret police within our system vast new powers over the lives and liberties of the people. At the request of the trusted and respected heads of those forces, and their appeal to the necessities of national security, we have exempted those grants of power from due accounting and strict surveillance.”

Hale Boggs (1914–1972) American politician

Speech before Congress (April 22, 1971)

People

“The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.”

Walter Pater (1839–1894) essayist, art and literature critic, fiction writer

On the Mona Lisa, in Leonardo da Vinci
The Renaissance http://www.authorama.com/renaissance-1.html (1873)

Love , Life , Women , Men

“[The Nazis] handed out billions in price subsidies to farmers…. As early as December 1939, a high-ranking financial administrator complained that the privileging of farmers ‘is in many case so grotesque that it can scarcely be kept secret from the rest of the populace, segments of which are being called on to make real sacrifices.”

Götz Aly (1947) German journalist, historian and social scientist

Source: Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (2007), p. 55

“But what this deed should be was kept secret from me.
And in this I saw that He willeth not that we dread to know the things that He sheweth: He sheweth them because He would have us know them; by which knowing He would have us love Him and have pleasure and endlessly enjoy in Him. For the great love that He hath to us He sheweth us all that is worshipful and profitable for the time.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 36

Love , Pleasure , Time

“Honorable things, not secretive things, are sought by good men.”
Honesta enim bonis viris, non occulta quaeruntur.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Book III, section 38
De Officiis – On Duties (44 BC)

Men

“I gave life to the walls
a voice I gave them
more friendly so that would become my company
and the guards asked
to know where they could find the paint.The walls of the cell
kept the secret
and the mercenaries searched everywhere
but paint they could not find.Because they did not think for one moment
that they should search into my veins.”

Alexandros Panagoulis (1939–1976) Greek politician and poet

I Bogia (The Paint).
Poetry, Vi scrivo da un carcere in Grecia (I write you from a prison in Greece) (1974)

Life , Search , Thinking , Painting

“Within Siddhartha there slowly grew and ripened the knowledge of what wisdom really was and the goal of his long seeking. It was nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling, and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.”

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) German writer

Siddhartha (1922)

Life , Wisdom , Art , Feeling

“You shouldn’t be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that’s what science is all about.”

Connie Willis Bellwether

Source: Bellwether (1996), Chapter 5 “Main Channel”, Section 2 (p. 226)

People , Thinking , Science

“Well, we all fall in love
But we disregard the danger
Though we share so many secrets
There are some we never tell.
Why were you so surprised
That you never saw the stranger?
Did you ever let your lover see
The stranger in yourself?”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

The Stranger.
Song lyrics, The Stranger (1977)

Love , Lovers

“I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts.”

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

"Circumfession." In Jacques Derrida, eds. G. Bennington & J. Derrida, trans. G. Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 170

Heart

“Raslovlev: The “protocols” written in 1897 states that the elders decreed the expulsion of all non-Jewish secret societies.
Graves: I question that! For in 1851’’’ Napoleon III, Joly’s enemy, banned and imprisoned 26,000 members of secret societies in France…46 years before the “Protocols!””

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.75

Question

“People nowadays have such high hopes of America and the political conditions obtaining there that one might say the desires, at least the secret desires, of all enlightened Europeans are deflected to the west, like our magnetic needles.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

G 2
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook G (1779-1783)

People , Hope

“The number one rule of today's marketing – the key secret of those who seek to control your beliefs and habits in order to take your money, your votes, your time or whatever else it is they desire from you – is to always keep in mind that nobody really believes they can be manipulated.”

Brian Vaszily (1970)

"The One Real Reason You Are Stressed Out, Overweight, Depressed or Angry" http://www.sixwise.com/newsletters/06/04/05/the_one_real_reason_you_are_stressed_out_overweight_depressed_or_angry.htm, SixWise.com, undated (accessed 2006-06-23)

Money , Time

“No more useful inquiry can be proposed than that which seeks to determine the nature and the scope of human knowledge. … This investigation should be undertaken once at least in his life by anyone who has the slightest regard for truth, since in pursuing it the true instruments of knowledge and the whole method of inquiry come to light. But nothing seems to me more futile than the conduct of those who boldly dispute about the secrets of nature … without yet having ever asked even whether human reason is adequate to the solution of these problems.”

René Descartes (1596–1650) French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist

Rules for the Direction of the Mind in Key Philosophical Writings (1997), pp. 29-30 http://books.google.com/books?id=jjWPe-9NPoEC&pg=PA29

Life , Truth , Nature , Knowledge

“Lemony Snicket: (narrating) Reading poetry, even if you are only reading to find a secret message within its words, can often give one a feeling of power, the way you can feel powerful if you are the only one who brought an umbrella on a rainy day, or the only one who knows how to untie knots when you're taken hostage.”

Daniel Handler book The Grim Grotto

The Grim Grotto (2004)

Way , Feeling , Reading

“We've already found a secret memo coming out of the Justice Department. They're now going to go after 12 new perversions, things like bestiality, polygamy, having sex with little boys and making that legal. Not only that, but they have a whole list of strategies to go after the churches, the pastors, and any businesses that tries to assert their religious liberty. This is coming and it's coming like a tidal wave.”

Tom DeLay (1947) American Republican politician

[2015-06-30, Steve Marlsberg Show, Newsmax TV, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZy8V7NAagQ], quoted in [2015-07-01, Tom DeLay Knows Of Secret DOJ Memo To Legalize '12 New Perversions,' Including Bestiality And Pedophilia, Kyle Mantyla, Right Wing Watch, 2015-07-03, http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/tom-delay-knows-secret-doj-memo-legalize-12-new-perversions-including-bestiality-and-pedophi]
2010s

Justice , Sex , Boy , Business

“Nimbly they seized and secreted their prey,
Alive and wriggling in the elastic net,
Which Nature hung beneath their grasping beaks;
Till, swoln with captures, the unwieldy burden
Clogg'd their slow flight, as heavily to land,
These mighty hunters of the deep return'd.
There on the cragged cliffs they perch'd at ease,
Gorging their hapless victims one by one;
Then full and weary, side by side, they slept,
Till evening roused them to the chase again.”

James Montgomery (1771–1854) British editor, hymn writer, and poet

Canto IV, line 141.
The Pelican Island (1827)

Nature

“Love without marriage can sometimes be very awkward for all concerned; but marriage without love simply removes that institution from the territory of the humanly admissible, to my mind. Love is a state in which one lives who loves, and whoever loves has given himself away; love then, and not marriage, is belonging. Marriage is a public declaration of a man and a woman that they have formed a secret alliance, with the intention to belong to, and share with each other, a mystical estate; mystical exactly in the sense that the real experience cannot be communicated to others, nor explained even to oneself on rational grounds.”

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist

"Marriage Is Belonging" in Collected Essays and Occasional Writings (1973)

Love , Marriage , Communication , Sense

“A secret remains a secret until you make someone promise never to reveal it.”

Fausto Cercignani (1941) Italian scholar, essayist and poet

Examples of self-translation (c. 2004), Quotes - Zitate - Citations - Citazioni

“Our enemies probably know every single one [of Clinton's deleted emails]. So they probably now have a blackmail file.. . . We can't hand over our government to someone whose deepest, darkest secrets may be in the hands of our enemies. Can't do it.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

June 22, 2016, speech, quoted in Nobody brings the crazy quite like Trump http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/nobody-brings-the-crazy-quite-like-trump/2016/06/22/74ba5692-38bd-11e6-9ccd-d6005beac8b3_story.html?utm_term=.8ca4d5443e7b Dana Milbank, Washington Post, June 22, 2016
2010s, 2016, June

“The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart,
When the full river of feeling overflows.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

Holidays http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/longfellow/19219 (1878).

Feeling , Silence , Holiday , Heart

“Does a population have informed consent when a ruling minority acts in secret to ignite a war, doing this to justify the existence of the minority's forces? […] failure to provide full information for informed consent on such an issue represents an ultimate crime.”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

"From The Trial of Trials", p. 246
The Bureau of Sabotage series, The Dosadi Experiment (1977)

War , Failure

“Freemasons, n. An order with secret rites, grotesque ceremonies and fantastic costumes, which, originating in the reign of Charles II, among working artisans of London, has been joined successively by the dead of past centuries in unbroken retrogression until now it embraces all the generations of man on the hither side of Adam and is drumming up distinguished recruits among the pre-Creational inhabitants of Chaos and Formless Void. The order was founded at different times by Charlemagne, Julius Caesar, Cyrus, Solomon, Zoroaster, Confucius, Thothmes, and Buddha. Its emblems and symbols have been found in the Catacombs of Paris and Rome, on the stones of the Parthenon and the Chinese Great Wall, among the temples of Karnak and Palmyra and in the Egyptian Pyramids — always by a Freemason.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Time , Success , Past , Dead

“We contrast the urban and the natural, but that’s a contemporary myth. We’re animals, after all; our cities are organic products, fully as “natural” (whatever that word really means) as a termite hill or a rabbit warren. But how much more interesting: how much more complex, dressed in the intricacies and exfoliations of human culture, simple patterns iterated into infinite variation. And full of secrets, secrets beyond counting.”

Robert Charles Wilson (1953) author

The Inner Inner City (p. 74)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Nature , Animals

“The fight against communal forces must be fought unitedly. We are the heirs to Panditji’s scientific outlook; and to Indiraji’s struggle against the forces of destabilization – terrorists, separatists, and communalists. We cannot fail them. Communalism must not be used as a political tool. If I may read a sentence from the secret Will of Babar to his son, Humayun: It is incumbent on thee to wipe all religious prejudices of the tablet of thy heart.”

Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991) sixth Prime Minister of India

In “Memorable Quote, Memorable Quotes from Rajiv Gandhi and on Rajiv Gandhis from Rajiv Gandhi and on Rajiv Gandhi (2009)” , Quote 41
Quote

Communication , Reading , Heart , Fight

“"Texe Marrs uncovers insider news the controlled media dare not report: … Hillary Clinton reveals family secret masquerading as a Christian and Gentile, she's actually Jewish and her grandmother was the Yiddish-speaking Della Rosenberg. Why is the First Lady only now telling the world she's a Jew?" (Secrets”

Texe Marrs (1944–2019) American writer

Vol. 39)

World , Family

“The secret virtues which lie hid in salt confirm the same. For salt whiteneth all thinges, it hardeneth all thinges, it preserveth all thinges, it giveth favour to all thinges, it is that masticke which gleweth all thinges together, it gathereth and knitteth all minerall matters, and of manie thousand peeces it maketh one masse. This salt giveth sounde to all thinges, and without the sounde no metall will wring in his shirle voyce. Salt maketh men merrie, it whiteneth the flesh, and it giveth beautie to all reasonable creatures, it entertayneth that love and amitie which is betwixt the male and female, through the great vigour and stirring uppe which it provoketh in the engendering members; it helpeth to procreation, it giveth unto creatures their voyce, as also unto metalles. * * * * * And it is salt that maketh all seedes to flourish and growe, and although the number of men is verie small, which can give any true reason whie dungue shoulde doe anie good in arable groundes, but are ledde thereto more by custome than anie philosophicall reason, nevertheless it is apparaunt that no dungue, which is layde uppon barraine groundes, could anie way enrich the same, if it were not for the salt which the straw and hay left behinde them by their putrifaction.”

Hugh Plat (1552–1608) writer

As cited in: Robert Kemp Philp (1859, p. 73)
The Jewell House of Art and Nature, 1594

Love , Men , Lie , Beauty

“time in an allegory of itself imparts to us lessons of wisdom which the moment they are formulated are immediately destroyed by the merest flickers of light or shadow which are nothing more than time in its incarnations and disincarnations which are the phrases that I am writing on this paper and that disappears as I read them:
they are not the sensations, the perceptions, the mental images, and the thoughts which flare up and die away here, now, as I write or as I read what I write: they are not what I see or what I have seen, they are the reverse of what is seen and of the power of sight—but they are not the invisible: they are the unsaid residuum;
they are not the other side of reality but, rather, the other side of language, what we have on the tip of our tongue that vanishes before it is said, the other side that cannot be named because it is the opposite of a name:
what is not said is not this or that which we leave unsaid, nor is it neither-this-nor-that: it is not the tree that I say I see but the sensation that I feel on sensing that I see it at the moment when I am just about to say that I see it, an insubstantial but real conjunction of vibrations and sounds and meanings that on being combined suggest the configuration of a green-bronze-black-woody-leafy-sonorous-silent presence;
no, it is not that either, if it is not a name it surely cannot be the description of a name or the description of the sensation of the name or the name of the sensation:
a tree is not the name tree, nor is it the sensation of tree: it is the sensation of a perception of tree that dies away at the very moment of the perception of the sensation of tree;
names, as we already know, are empty, but what we did not know, or if we did know, had forgotten, is that sensations are perceptions of sensations that die away, sensations that vanish on becoming perceptions, since if they were not perceptions, how would we know that they are sensations?;
sensations that are not perceptions are not sensations, perceptions that are not names—what are they?
if you didn’t know it before, you know now: everything is empty;
and the moment I say everything-is-empty, I am aware that I am falling into a trap: if everything is empty, this everything-is-empty is empty too;
no, it is full, full to overflowing, everything-is-empty is replete with itself, what we touch and see and taste and smell and think, the realities that we invent and the realities that touch us, look at us, hear us, and invent us, everything that we weave and unweave and everything that weaves and unweaves us, momentary appearances and disappearances, each one different and unique, is always the same full reality, always the same fabric that is woven as it is unwoven: even total emptiness and utter privation are plenitude (perhaps they are the apogee, the acme, the consummation and the calm of plenitude), everything is full to the brim, everything is real, all these invented realities and all these very real inventions are full of themselves, each and every one of them, replete with their own reality;
and the moment I say this, they empty themselves: things empty themselves and names fill themselves, they are no longer empty, names are plethoras, they are donors, they are full to bursting with blood, milk, semen, sap, they are swollen with minutes, hours, centuries, pregnant with meanings and significations and signals, they are the secret signs that time makes to itself, names suck the marrow from things, things die on this page but names increase and multiply, things die in order that names may live:”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 9

Wisdom , Feeling , Thinking , Reality

“The whole secret of the study of nature lies in learning how to use one's eyes.”

George Sand (1804–1876) French novelist and memoirist; pseudonym of Lucile Aurore Dupin

Apprendre à voir, voilà tout le secret des études naturelles.
http://books.google.com/books?id=btRg0Qw2X9MC&q=%22Apprendre+%C3%A0+voir+voil%C3%A0+tout+le+secret+des+%C3%A9tudes+naturelles%22&pg=PA51#v=onepage
Letter to Juliette Lambert-Adam (7 April 1868)

Nature , Study , Learning

“The members of our secret service have apparently spent so much time under the bed looking for communists that they haven't had the time to look in the bed.”

Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician

on the Profumo Scandal, 1963
1960s

Time

“We cannot understand the preaching of the resurrection if it is understood as a miraculous moment which founds a new religion. If it is taken thus, we are in fact denying the force and efficacy of the resurrection. For the resurrection brings about the definitive installation in our midst, as a constructive hermeneutical principle, of the cult of Yahweh who knows not death, and who is worshipped in a continuous apprenticeship in participating in and not being scandalised by the collapse of the sacred. A sacred whose secret is always the victims which it hides, and on whose sacrifice it depends.”

James Alison (1959) Christian theologian, priest

Source: Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001), " Theology amidst the stones and dust http://girardianlectionary.net/res/alison_elijah.htm", p. 34.

Death , Religion , Understanding , Dependency

“This is Bruno's fundamental idea. He says: ”To recognize this unity of form and matter in all things, is what reason is striving to attain to. But in order to penetrate to this unity, in order to investigate all the secrets of Nature, we must search into the opposed and contradictory extremes of things, the maximum and the minimum” It is in these very extremes that they are intelligible, and become united in the Notion; and this union of them is infinite Nature. “To find the point of union is not the greatest matter; but to develop from, the same its very opposite, this is the real and the deepest secret of the art” It is saying much if we speak of knowing the development of the Idea as a necessity of determinations; we shall see later how Bruno proceeded to do this. He represents the original principle, which is elsewhere known as the form, under the Notion of the minimum, which is at the same time the maximum One, which at the same time is All; the universe is this One in All.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History Vol 3 1837 translated by ES Haldane and Francis H. Simson) first translated 1896 P. 128
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 3

Art , Search , Intelligence , Idea