Secrets

The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and just not think about your age. ~~ Lucille Ball

Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside. ~~ Mark Twain

The true secret of giving advice, is after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not and never persist in trying to set people right. ~~ Hannah Whitall Smith

The cynic puts all human actions into two classes--openly bad and secretly bad. ~~ Henry Ward Beecher

There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won't. ~~ William Least Heat-Moon [William Trogdon]

One of the best-kept secrets in America is that people are aching to make a commitment, if they only had the freedom and environment in which to do so. ~~ John Naisbitt

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. ~~ Benjamin Franklin

The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope. That is why the patient's hopes are the physician's secret weapon. They are the hidden ingredients in any prescription. ~~ Norman Cousins

In families children tend to take stock roles, as if there were hats hung up in some secret place, visible only to the children. Each succeeding child selects a hat and takes on that role, the good child, the black

sheep, the clown, and so forth. ~~ Ellen Galinsky

Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self. ~~ May Sarton

You could never accuse him [the cat] of idleness, and yet he knew the secret of repose. ~~ Charles Dudley Warner

I can't speak for any other marriage, but the secret of our marriage is that we have absolutely nothing in common. ~~ Mamie Eisenhower

The secret of joy is contained in one word--excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it. ~~ Pearl S. Buck

There's no secret about success. Did you ever know a successful man who didn't tell you about it? ~~ Kin Hubbard

The great secret of successful marriage is to treat all disasters as incidents and none of the incidents as disasters. ~~ Harold Nicholson

What a commentary on our civilization when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it--like a secret vice! ~~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The most difficult secret for a man to keep is his own opinion of himself. ~~ Marcel Pagnol

Public men are bees working in a glass hive; and curious spectators enjoy themselves in watching every secret movement, as if it were a study in natural history. ~~ Henry Ward Beecher

The talent for secrecy is highly developed among doctors who, even with nothing to conceal, are often as close mouthed as old-fashioned bomb throwers on their way to a rendezvous. ~~ Ben Hecht

Parents accept their obsolescence with the best grace they can muster… they do all they can to make it easy for the younger generation to surpass the older, while secretly dreading the rejection that follows. ~~ Christopher Lasch

Secrecy is as indispensable to human beings as fire, and as greatly feared. ~~ Sissela Bok [Secrets]

The secret of a happy life is accept change gracefully. ~~ Jimmy Stewart

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation. ~~ George Bernard Shaw

The mind, the tongue, soon learn to dissemble, to guard a secret well, but the human face is a window. ~~ Lawrence L. Lynch

I don't think secrets agree with me; I feel rumpled up in my mind since you told me that. ~~ Louisa May Alcott [Little Women]

Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth. ~~ Amy Tan [The Joy Luck Club]

It is no secret that organized crime in America takes in over $40 billion a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies. ~~ Woody Allen

The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he. ~~ Karl Kraus

People are always asking couples whose marriage has endured at least a quarter of a century for their secret for success. Actually, it is no secret at all. I am a forgiving woman. Long ago, I forgave my husband for not being Paul Newman. ~~ Erma Bombeck

It is easier to talk about money--and much easier to talk about sex—than it is to talk about power. People who have it deny it; people who want it do not want to appear to hunger for it; and people who engage in its

machinations do so secretly. ~~ Rosabeth Moss Kanter

We are "influenced" by something which is close and similar to the roots of our soul. Real influence is that which helps us be ourselves, that which elicits the hidden, the deepest secrets in ourselves. ~~ Yizhar Simlansky

For countless ages the sun rose and set, the moon waxed and waned, the stars shone in the Milky Way; but it was only with the coming of man that these things were understood. Man has unveiled secrets which might have been thought undiscoverable. Much has been achieved in the realm of art, science, literature, and religion. Is all this to end because so few are able to think of man rather than of this or that group of men? ~~ U Thant

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. ~~ Charles Dickens [A Tale of Two Cities]

Twaddle, rubbish, and gossip is what people want, not action… The secret of life is to chatter freely about all one wishes to do and how one is always being prevented--and then do nothing. ~~ Soren Kierkegaard

If you would wish another to keep your secret, first keep it yourself. ~~ Seneca

The secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered I was not God. ~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven. ~~ Mark Twain

Self-criticism is the secret weapon of democracy. ~~ Adlai E. Stevenson Cats are always elegant. They know that the secret of elegance is a combination of several components: fear--affection to be given grudgingly and withdrawn on whim; suspicion--to create mystery; and security--acquired from the ability to run like hell. Cats are also superbly dressed in great colors and fabrics: each possesses one supremely simple outfit which never wears out. ~~ John Weitz

I've been with the best and the worst in my life, and the secret is they're all people. ~~ Helen Drazenovich Berklich

What was silent in the father speaks in the son; and often I found the son the unveiled secret of the father. ~~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; a mother's secret hope outlives them all. ~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

[On siblings:] We shared parents. Home. Pets. Celebrations. Catastrophes. Secrets. And the threads of our experience became so interwoven that we are linked. I can never be utterly lonely knowing you share the planet. ~~ Pam Brown

The secret of good cooking is first, having a love of it … If you're convinced cooking is drudgery, you're never going to be any good at it, and you might as well warm up something frozen. ~~ James Beard

I am secretly afraid of animals… I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which belies it, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and

left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? Their eyes seem to ask. ~~ Edith Wharton

The secret of respectability is to ignore what you don't understand. ~~ Christopher Morley

He lives in the half-lights in secret places, free and alone—this mysterious little-great being whom his mistress calls "My cat." ~~ Margaret Benson

I would like to have engraved inside every wedding band "Be kind to one another." This is the Golden Rule of Marriage and the secret of making love last through the years. ~~ Randolph Ray

The secret of discipline is motivation. When a man is sufficiently motivated, discipline will take care of itself. ~~ Sir Alexander Paterson

Where secrecy reigns, carelessness and ignorance delight to hide—skill loves the light. ~~ Daniel C. Gelman

Regard with distrust all circumstances which seem to favor our secret desires. ~~ Emile Gaboriau

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops. ~~ H. L. Mencken

There are no more thorough prudes than those who have some little secret to hide. ~~ George Sand

Never participate in the secrets of those above you: you think you share the fruit, and you share the stones … the confidence of a prince is not a grant, but a tax. ~~ Baltasar Gracian

I think one reason we admire cats, those of us who do, is their proficiency in one-upmanship. They always seem to come out on top, no matter what they are doing--or pretend they do. Rarely do you see a cat discomfited. They have no conscience, and they never regret. Maybe we secretly envy them. ~~ Barbara Webster

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well. ~~ Hugh Walpole

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion. ~~ Doris Lessing

The secret breathed within
And never spoken, woken
By music; the garlands in
Her hands no one has seen.
She wreathes the air with green and weaves the stillness in. ~~ May Sarton

More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations. ~~ John Barth

Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long last lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of adream. ~~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Secrecy in government has become synonymous, in the public mind, with deception by the government. ~~ Lawton M. Chiles, Jr.

Whenever he was out of luck and a little down-hearted, he would fall to mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where women and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets, for they must love something). And he always spoke of the strange sagacity of that cat with the air of a man who believed in his secret heart that there was something human about it--maybe even supernatural. ~~ Mark Twain

The secret of all those who make discoveries is that they regard nothing as impossible. ~~ Justus Liebig

The secret of patience: do something else in the meantime. ~~ Unattributed

It is a secret, both in nature and state, that it is safer to change many things than one. ~~ Francis Bacon

Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control. ~~ Allen Ginsberg

I've always believed in the adage that the secret of eternal youth is arrested development. ~~ Alice Roosevelt Longworth

Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity. ~~ William Hazlitt

Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasm, tastes and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessor and to posterity. ~~ Arthur Chapman

We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon--no alternative. ~~ Golda Meir (See Said Who?)

Still round the corner there may wait,
A new road, or a secret gate. ~~ J. R. R. Tolkien

There is a secret person undamaged in every individual. ~~ Paul Shepard

A person who has no secrets is a liar. We always fold ourselves away from others just enough to preserve a secret or two, something that we cannot share without destroying our inner landscape. ~~ Anne Roiphe [Lovingkindness]

No one gossips about other people's secret virtues. ~~ Bertrand Russell [On Education]

Madness is always fascinating, for it reveals the ungluing we all secretly fear: the mind taking off from the body, the possibility that the magnet that attaches us to a context in the world can lose its grip. ~~ Molly Haskell

The instruments of power--arms, gold, machines, magical or technical secrets--always exist independently of him who disposes of them, and can be taken up by others. Consequently all power is unstable. ~~ Simone Weil [Oppression and Liberty]

The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony. ~~ V. S. Pritchett

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm. ~~ Aldous Huxley

The only way to keep a secret is to forget it. ~~ Old Postcard

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously overcompensates a secret doubt. ~~ Aldous Huxley

It is such a secret place, the land of tears. ~~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The secret of making one's self tiresome is not to know when to stop. ~~ Voltaire

Shy and unready men are great betrayers of secrets; for there are few wants more urgent for the moment than the want of something to say. ~~ Henry Taylor

Secretly, we wish anyone we love will think exactly the way we do. ~~ Kim Chernin [In My Mother's House]

The secret of growing old is having lots of experience you can no longer use. ~~ Stanislaw Lec

In the Chinese world, nothing could be kept secret, the very word for secret also meant unlawful. ~~ Pearl S. Buck [My Several Worlds]

[On Washington DC:] A city where the Capitol Dome, perforated like a kitchen colander, is the symbol of how secrets are kept. ~~ Leslie Ford

How can we expect another to keep our secret if we have been unable to keep it ourselves? ~~ La Rochefoucauld

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats. ~~ Iris Murdoch

The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided. ~~ Casey Stengel

Don't let your special character and values, the secret that you know and no one else does, the truth--don't let that get swallowed up by the great chewing complacency. ~~ Meryl Streep

The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning. ~~ Lewis Thomas

No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit. ~~ Helen Keller

Believe me, every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not; and oft times we call a man cold when he is only sad. ~~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The secret to living is to find a pivot, the pivot of a concept on which you can make your stand. ~~ Luigi Pirandello

The secret of my success is that I always managed to live to fly another day. ~~ Chuck Yeager

Liberty and indulgence can do no good to children… and on the contrary, imperiousness and severity is but an ill way of treating men… unless you have a mind to make your children, when grown up, weary of you, and secretly to say within themselves, When will you die, father? ~~ John Locke [Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1692)]

I'm not a great believer that there are deeper secrets behind the distance between [men and women] that are locked up somewhere waiting to be discovered. Generally, I don't think people talk very much, regardless of who they are. ~~ Elvis Costello

There is always a secret irritation about a laugh into which we cannot join. ~~ Agnes Repplier

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. ~~ Diane Arbus

I am a reflection of my mother's secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers. ~~ Audre Lorde

Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat. ~~ M. F. K. Fisher

The wise have a solid sense of silence and the ability to keep a storehouse of secrets. Their capacity and character are respected. ~~ Baltasar Gracian

The cat, like the genius, draws into itself as into a shell except in the atmosphere of congeniality, and this is the secret of its remarkable and elusive personality. ~~ Ida M. Mellen