• The backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy. (Carl von Clausewitz)
• The best way to spread the most news in the least time is to disguise it as a secret.
• Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal. (Russell Lynes)
• The easiest way to keep a secret is without help.
• Everyone needs someone with whom to share their secrets.
• Expect nothing; live frugally on surprise. (Alice Walker)
• The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart. (Saint Jerome (374 AD - 419 AD)
• He that communicates his secret to another makes himself that other's slave. (Baltasar Gracián)
• How can we expect another to keep our secret if we have been unable to keep it ourselves? (François Duc de La Rochefoucauld)
• I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret. (Walter Winchell)
• If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees. (Kahlil Gibran)
• Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
• Life is full of surprises, isn't it? (Charlton Heston)
• Many a secret that cannot be pried out by curiosity can be drawn out by indifference. (Sydney J. Harris)
• The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us. (Ashley Morgan Montagu)
• Most people can keep a secret. It's the ones they tell it to that can't.
• A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are keeping. (Kenneth Tynan)
• No one gossips about other people's secret virtues. (Bertrand Russell)
• None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them. (Charles Caleb Colton)
• Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets. (Paul Tournier)
• A secret's a secret till it's told.
• Splendid Surprise
• A statement that begins: "This has to be kept in the strictest confidence..." makes me wonder why the speaker isn't keeping it in strictest confidence.
• Surprised by joy - impatient as the wind. (William Wordsworth)
• Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable. (Jane Austen)
• Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. (Benjamin Franklin)
• Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change. (Thomas Hardy)
• To him that you tell your secret you resign your liberty.
• To keep your secret is wisdom; but to expect others to keep it is folly. (Samuel Johnson)
• To know that one has a secret is to know half the secret itself. (Henry Ward Beecher)
• The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it. (Samuel Johnson)
• When what you see is not always what you get!
• Women's propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing. (Barbara Grizzuti Harrison)
• Wonder is from surprise, and surprise stops with experience. (Bishop Robert South)
• You shouldn't be so eager to find out a secret. It could change your life forever.
• Your secret is safe with me...and all my friends.

I've Got a Secret!

I've got a secret! Oh, I've got a secret!
But I made a promise I wouldn't repeat it.
I've got a secret! Yes, I've got a secret!
But I took an oath and I vowed I would keep it.

Nothing and no one can make me reveal
this wonderful secret I swore I'd conceal.
No form of torture can make me disclose,
this secret I promised I wouldn't expose.

From now until doomsday my secret I'll keep;
I won't breathe a whisper or utter a peep.
Unless you assure me that you'll keep it too -
then maybe, just maybe, I'll share it with you

The Secret

(from "How Far Away is Somewhere")

The Secret Sits

(Robert Frost)

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.