Actions are visible, though motives are secret.
Samuel Johnson

The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.
Samuel Johnson

To keep your secret is wisdom; but to expect others to keep it is folly.
Samuel Johnson

You've got to work hard for your success and you've got to have a steady presence. That's the secret.
Kid Rock

Things forbidden have a secret charm.
Tacitus

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret.
Hermann Hesse

A great many men's gratitude is nothing but a secret desire to hook in more valuable kindnesses hereafter.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Our aversion to lying is commonly a secret ambition to make what we say considerable, and have every word received with a religious respect.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

In most of mankind gratitude is merely a secret hope of further favors.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
Paul Valery

You might hold an ethical position that it's wrong to lie, but if you have plans for a war in Iraq, and you want to keep them secret for practical reasons - to reduce casualties, perhaps - and someone asks you about those plans, you may need to lie for a 'good' outcome.
Peter Singer

Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The secret to happiness is freedom... And the secret to freedom is courage.
Thucydides

The secret of life is to have no fear; it's the only way to function.
Stokely Carmichael

It is the public scandal that offends; to sin in secret is no sin at all.
Moliere

I would say that the Pentagon Papers case of 1971 - in which the government tried to block the The New York Times and The Washington Post that they obtained from a secret study of how we got involved in the war in Vietnam - that is probably the most important case.
Floyd Abrams

Hidden nature is secret God.
Sri Aurobindo

The secret of all effective originality in advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.
Leo Burnett