Secrets Quotes

Your secret is your prisoner; once you reveal it, you become its slave.

Ibn Gabirol

Whoever wishes to keep a secret must hide the fact that he possesses one.

Johann von Goethe

Secrecy is the badge of fraud.

Sir John Chadwick

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.

George Orwell

if you were quiet and blended into the background, you were less likely to make waves

Jodi Picoult

When a friend, then, indulges in the joy of unburdening a secret on to another friend's bosom, he makes the latter, in his turn, feel the urge to taste the same joy himself. He implores him, it is true, not to tell a soul; but if such a condition were taken absolutely literally, it would at once cut off the flow of these joys at their very source. The general practice is for the secret to be confided only to an equally trustworthy friend, the same conditions being imposed on him. And so from trustworthy friend to trustworthy friend the secret goes moving on round that immense chain, until finally it reaches the ears of just the very person or persons whom the first talker had expressly intended it never should reach.

Alessandro Manzoni

Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.

Don DeLillo

If you reveal your secrets to the wind you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

Kahlil Gibran

Our true history is scarcely ever deciphered by others. The chief part of the drama is a monologue, or rather an intimate debate between God, our conscience, and ourselves. Tears, grieves, depressions, disappointments, irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, deliberations --all these belong to our secret, and are almost all incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to speak of them, and even when we write them down.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Secrets travel fast in Paris.

Napoleon Bonaparte

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

George Orwell

How can we expect somebody else to keep our secret if we cannot keep it ourselves?

George Bernard Shaw

The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

What is told into the ear of a man is often heard a hundred miles away.

Chinese Proverb

Never tell a secret to a bride or a groom; wait until they have been married longer.

Edward W. Howe

I know that's a secret, for it's whispered everywhere.

William Congreve

I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret.

Walter Winchell

A man can keep a secret better than his own. A woman her own better than others.

Jean de la Bruyere

Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.

Lord (John Emerich Edward Dalber

O divine art of subtlety and secrecy! Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible and hence we can hold the enemy's fate in our hands.

SunTzu