"Open secret" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to hold the open secret any longer, told the Pet about Grump's operation in dust. Great was the astonishment of the young man, and puzzling miners gained sympathy from the weak eyes and open mouth of the Pet as he meandered homeward, evidently as much ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... Here are stories which powerfully affect the reader, which can he reperused at any age, and where the characters are no more than puppets. The bony fist of the showman visibly propels them; their springs are an open secret; their faces are of wood, their bellies filled with bran; and yet we thrillingly partake of their adventures. And the point may be illustrated still further. The last interview between Lucy and Richard Feveril is pure drama; more than that, it is the strongest scene, since ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dissecting Seraphina's character to her approving husband. Of course no names were used; and of course the identity of that abstract or ideal man, with whom she was currently contrasted, remained an open secret. But this stiff old gentleman had a wonderful instinct for evil, thus to wind his way into man's citadel; thus to harp by the hour on the virtues of his hearer and not once alarm his self-respect. Otto was all roseate, in and out, with flattery and Tokay and an approving conscience. He saw ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... imaginary dangers, however, for striking his trail was purely accidental, and no effort whatever was being made to arrest him personally. Had this been especially desired it might have been accomplished very readily just after Lee's surrender, for it was an open secret that Early was then not far away, pretty badly disabled ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... made it and as we live it. Hapgood, if I kept forty women in different parts of London and made no secret of it, nothing would be said. People would know I was rather a shameless lot, my little ways would be an open secret, but nothing would be said. I should be received everywhere. But I'm thought to have brought one woman into my house and I'm banned. I'm unspeakable. Forty, flagrantly, outside, and I'm still a received member of society. ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... early letters of intimate friendship (as given in Hay and Nicolay's biography), show a singular capacity for romantic affection, and gleams of hope of supreme happiness. But death frustrated this hope, and the disappointment brought him to the verge of insanity. In his domestic life,—it was an open secret,—he had some of the experience which disciplined Socrates. Perhaps we go to the root of his sadness if we say that in his deepest heart he was a passionate idealist, and by circumstances he was long ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... "It is an open secret, I suppose, sir," said the correspondent of the Times, "that when McClellan does see fit to cross you will meet him east of the ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... subjecting their unfortunate victims to the foul air of the station house, and the still fouler language of its guardians. Yet crimes are rapidly multiplying, and society is paying the price. On the other hand, it is an open secret that when the unfortunate citizen has been given the full "mercy" of the law, and for the sake of safety is hidden in the worst of hells, his real Calvary begins. Robbed of his rights as a human being, degraded to a mere automaton without will ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... much more by this time—the whole of his open secret. But he did not understand her. History has revealed that a supernumerary lover or two is rarely considered a disadvantage by a woman, from queen to cottage-girl; and the thought ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... honourable injuries and in the savour of fame Gilbert Elliott of the Cauldstaneslap; but his sons had scarce less glory out of the business. Their savage haste, the skill with which Dand had found and followed the trail, the barbarity to the wounded Dickieson (which was like an open secret in the county), and the doom which it was currently supposed they had intended for the others, struck and stirred popular imagination. Some century earlier the last of the minstrels might have fashioned the last of the ballads out of that Homeric fight and chase; but the spirit ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the gossip, to distinguish it from scores of other places of the better sort. We had no trouble in finding out that Miss White had not returned home at all the night before. The landlady seemed to look on her as a woman of mystery, and confided to us that it was an open secret that she was not an American at all, but a French girl whose name, she believed, was really Lucille Leblanc—which, after all, was White. Kennedy made no comment, but I wavered between the conclusions that she had been the victim of foul play and that she might be ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... through the lower and busier end of which they were obliged to pass, Mr. Taggett caused a sensation. The drivers of carts and the pedestrians on both sidewalks stopped and looked at him. The part he had played in Slocum's Yard was now an open secret, and had produced an excitement that was not confined to the clientele of Snelling's bar-room. It was known that William Durgin had disappeared, and tdhat the constables were searching for him. The air was thick with flying projectures, but none of them precisely hit the mark. One rumor there ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... assize. The latter died of delirium tremens, and it was whispered around that his family were afraid to bring a physician, because he raved so of the treacherous slaying of Richard Ashton. The judge was said to have died of brain fever, and the sheriff of inflammation; yet it is an open secret that drink was the real agent in ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... to talk. It was an open secret that he had loved Kate faithfully ever since he joined the gang. But apparently Terry Hollis cared little about the moods of the girl. He was the center of festivities that evening until an interruption ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... well understood, have much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they are still the same; in this most important respect especially, That they have penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the Universe; what Goethe calls 'the open secret'. 'Which is the great secret?' asks one.—'The open secret,'—open to all, seen by almost none! That divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, 'the Divine Idea of the World, that which lies at the bottom of Appearance,' as Fichte styles it; of which ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... an open secret among King's friends in California that he meditated writing of the Yosemite as he had written of the White Hills of New Hampshire. Had he done so that region of incomparable beauty would have been known to the people of our country at least ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... the poet's eyes are opened; he sees the changes of many-colored existence, and sees the loveliness and deep purport which lies hidden under the very meanest of them; hidden to the vulgar sight, but clear to the poet's; because the 'open secret' is no longer a secret to him, and he knows that the Universe is /full/ of goodness; that whatever has ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... man! His army? Just 318 odd fellows, armed like a circus crowd. And he won too. "He always wins who sides with God." What pluck! Only a farmer! No war training! Yet what hero has eclipsed his feat? His open secret? He was ...
— The Chocolate Soldier - Heroism—The Lost Chord of Christianity • C. T. Studd
... of the Mounted Police. Deane, in his annual report for 1906, refers to the only effort that had ever been made to rob a train, and starts with the following revealing statement: "It has for years been an open secret that the train-robbing fraternity in the United States had seriously considered the propriety of trying conclusions with the Mounted Police, but had decided that the risks were too great and the game not worth the candle. After the object lesson they received last May, it may be reasonably ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... in Europe were not thrown away upon his ardent and artistic temperament. He has stood before the great pictures to some purpose, and has not failed to read their open secret. ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... seven years after its publication, and after it had gone through three or four separate editions, it was praised by a contemporary poet, George Whetstone, himself a friend of Spenser's, as the "reputed work of Sir Philip Sidney." But if it was officially a secret, it was an open secret, known to every one who cared to be well informed. It is possible that the free language used in it about ecclesiastical abuses was too much in sympathy with the growing fierceness and insolence of Puritan invective to be safely used by a poet who gave his name: and one of the reasons ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... ground in guessing him vastly proud of trotting Goethe round. Such fame throughout Europe had Goethe won by his works that it was necessary for him to travel incognito. Not that his identity wasn't an open secret, nor that he himself would have wished it hid. Great artists are always vain. To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people. A conceited man is satisfied with the effect he produces on himself. ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... of Mr Kettle, in writing this book, is, I take it, to reveal to English readers what he not inaptly terms as "The Open Secret of Ireland," in order to bring about a better understanding between the two nations, and to smoothe the way to a just and final settlement of their old-time differences. Any work undertaken on such lines commends itself to a ready welcome and a careful study, and I feel sure that both await ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... instincts of all men, something that, coming from the heart, naturally clothes itself in fitting words and gives individual colour to each tone, gesture, and expression. These, therefore, we must study if we would penetrate to the open secret of the artist, if we would seize the vital spirit of his utterance and make it our own. Lamb's sense of poetic form, his instinct for subtle shades of difference, was far keener than Hazlitt's. And for that very reason he may ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... drive away the roses in the cheeks of womanhood, undermine health and produce a brazen countenance that can be read by all men. The harlot may commit her sins in the dark, but her countenance reveals her character and her immorality is an open secret. ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... one knows it. Louise makes no mystery of her doings—doesn't care that much what people say. While as for him—well, it's enough to know it's Schilsky. The thing is an open secret. Listen, now, and I'll tell you how it began—just to let you judge for yourself what kind of a girl you have to deal with in Louise, and how Schilsky behaves when he wants a thing, and whether such a pair think a formal engagement necessary to their happiness. When Louise came here, a year ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... The open secret of the wonderful influence which Madame Swetchine exerted on all who came in contact with her, of the extreme reverence and love with which they regarded her, was, therefore, the incomparable power, sincerity, generosity, and gentleness of her character. But to appreciate this truth, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... the masses are pitiless irony. There is no need for symposiums. It is an open secret. It cries upon the house-tops. It calls above the world in the Sabbath bells. A church that believes less than the world believes shall lose its leadership in the world. "Why should I pay pew rent," says the man who sings with his hands, "to men who do not believe ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... fact, decorative woman rules the fashions, and if decorative woman makes up her mind to retain a line or a limit, she does it. The open secret is that every great Paris house has its chic clientele, which in returning from the Riviera—Europe's Peacock Alley—is full of knowledge as to how the last fashions (line and colour), succeeded in scoring in the role designated. ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... the means or the resources necessary for renewing an open war with his father, but his disposition to do this was as strong as ever, and he began immediately to open secret communications and correspondence with all the nobles and barons in Normandy whom he thought disposed to espouse his cause. He succeeded in inducing them to make secret contributions of funds to supply his pecuniary wants, of course promising to ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... suffered was caused by an almost invisible insect, and, furthermore, had acquired the trick of dislodging the pestiferous little creature with the point of a needle. From them a youth of the country, F. Renucci by name, learned the open secret. He conveyed it to Paris when he went there to study medicine, and in 1834 demonstrated it to his master Alibert. This physician, at first sceptical, soon was convinced, and gave out the discovery to the medical world with an authority that led to ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... brings out in the most striking manner the efficiency of our detective police force, and will serve as a lesson to all foreigners that they will do wisely to settle their feuds at home, and not to carry them on to British soil. It is an open secret that the credit of this smart capture belongs entirely to the well-known Scotland Yard officials, Messrs. Lestrade and Gregson. The man was apprehended, it appears, in the rooms of a certain Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who has himself, as an amateur, ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... And what pleasure do you suppose mere abstinence from evil words implies, when it is an open secret that those silent persons are cherishing all evil thoughts against the tyrant? (24) What mirth, do you imagine, is to be extracted from their panegyrics who are suspected of bestowing ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... of, there was an open secret to every well informed Greek that the Queen of Greece, Olga, had been the tool of the Russian bureaucracy, trying by means of religious influences to keep the Greeks under the Russian political control; ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... had come to know something about me. I was a globe-trotter, a man of leisure, interested as a hobby in research work in medicine. I discovered that her affair with the young Grand Duke was a fairly open secret in her set; also, that she was expecting him in London almost daily. Gradually I hinted that I knew the young Grand Duke. As I gained her confidence further, I invented amorous affairs for him and hinted to her about them. In this way I finally managed ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... proceeds from error to error, abounding in reckless misstatements, atrocious imputations, and scattering charges void of truth. As briefly as possible, I will deal with his accusations. One of his first deliverances is as follows:—"It is, of course, an open secret that in all our Soudan battles the enemy's wounded have been killed. The practice has, ever since the days of Tel-el-Kebir, become traditional in Soudanese warfare. After the battle of Atbara, it was announced that 3000 dervishes had been killed. There was practically no mention of the wounded.... ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... predicament. He felt, at times, that there was something wrong, that the rest of the Department did not look on life and work as he did. But he could not decide just where the trouble lay. And in his uncertainty he made it a point to entrench himself by means of "politics." It became an open secret that he had a pull, that his position was impregnable. This in turn tended to coarsen his methods. It lifted him beyond the domain of competitive effort. It touched his carelessness with arrogance. It also tinged his arrogance ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... He raked John Ellery fore and aft. The parson, he said, had disgraced the society and his sacred profession and should be hove overboard immediate. 'Twas an open secret, he said. Everybody knew how he, minister of a Reg'lar church, had been carryin' on with a Come-Outer girl, meetin' her unbeknownst to anyone, and so on. As he got warmed up on this subject he got more bitter and, though he didn't come out open ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... which, truth to tell, had little effect upon the culprit. It was not the first, nor the second, nor the twentieth time that a similar scene had been enacted, for "mother's resurrections" were a standing joke in the Asplin family, and the final fate thereof an open secret. However lofty might be the first suggested use, the end was always the same. Her offerings scorned by ungrateful relatives, she took refuge in dusters, and patiently hemmed squares of the rejected fabrics, with which to enrich the already lordly store of these useful commodities. On the present ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... the currents. There had then been a talk of Tilsit, and diverting the stream, or part of it towards Macdonald in the north. But D'Arragon knew that Macdonald was likely to be in no better plight than Murat; for it was an open secret in Dantzig that Yorck, with four-fifths of Macdonald's army, was ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... interesting as a novel, and epoch-making in its way. He worked like a horse, did Walker—huge consulting practice—hours a day in the clinical wards—constant original investigations. And then he enjoyed himself also. 'De mortuis,' of course, but still it's an open secret among all who knew him. If he died at forty-five, he crammed eighty years into it. The marvel was that he could have held on so long at the pace at which he was going. But he took it ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... have excited antipathies injurious to the propaganda of Utilitarianism. They held, for that reason presumably, that they were not bound to point out the ultimate goal of their speculations. No intelligent reader of their other writings could fail to see what that goal must be; but an 'open secret' is still for many purposes a real secret. Whatever might be the suspicions of their antagonists, they could only be accused of a tendency. The book amounts to an admission that the suspicions were ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... warm and negotiable thing. Yes, and that was the final cruelty. To love and be loved—this, he had come to know, was all that mattered. Yesterday, to love and die had seemed felicity enough. Now he knew that the secret, the open secret, of happiness was in mutual love—a state that needed not the fillip of death. And he had to die without having ever lived. Admiration, homage, fear, he had sown broadcast. The one woman who had loved him had turned ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... It was an open secret—his attachment to a lady, who had been his pupil, and was now generally understood to be his fiancee. She was far younger than he; but at fifty-three he was not an old man; and the friends who fully knew and understood the affair favoured ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... his life Mr. Chester had come to resemble one. With his lean body and drooping oval head, he was not unlike the figure nine, an analogy that might be continued by saying that nine is the highest degree a bachelor number can achieve, the figures after that going in couples. It was an open secret that the tragedy of Mr. Chester's uneventful life ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... intercepted letter of the imprudent Spanish Minister, and his subsequent disgrace and recall—was another much-discussed topic. It was an open secret, especially among the newspaper fraternity and others in the know, that the former minister had dispensed with lavish hand a corruption fund to influence writers on the American press. A little clique of journalists in and around ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... had been an open secret that considerable masses of German troops were being transported to the Carpathian front. What was not known, however, was the magnitude or the plan of these preparations. Never was a greater concentration of men and machinery more silently and more speedily accomplished. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... to whisper; your opinion is an open secret," answered Madeleine drily. "There is a woman, and there she sits, as you no doubt very well know." As she spoke, she pointed to a photograph of Louise, which stood on ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... me here," continued the father, "told me a curious story. It seems that Mr. Crisp here has toiled and moiled for many years, keeping you in comparative luxury and idleness. Not a word, sir. It's an open secret. For some occult reason he likes to pay this price for your company. Having supported you so long, I presume he is prepared to support ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... is the first great practical lesson that we learn from the study of the laws of our human nature, taken in their widest aspect, under the teaching of the Divine Master, the "open secret" of overcoming in man and woman alike, that which restores to us our whole nature, and vindicates it, even in the depths of disorder into which it has practically fallen, as originally bearing the Divine stamp. The more unconscious we are in the pursuit of physical good, the better ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... his hours of privacy when off duty, this apparently ideal servitor was so far from being a respecter of persons that he was accustomed to speak of Lord Belpher as "Percy", and even as "His Nibs". It was, indeed, an open secret among the upper servants at the castle, and a fact hinted at with awe among the lower, that Keggs was ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... that the earlier reviewers were mere literary hacks whose names would have given no weight to the critique and hence could be omitted without much loss. The authorship of important Edinburgh and Quarterly[E] articles in the days of their greatness was usually an open secret. Later periodicals, like the Fortnightly and the Academy found it a profitable advertisement to publish the signatures of their eminent critics. The tendency of the present day is largely in favor of anonymity; ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... It is an open secret that the house of mirth lacks every convenience demanded of a permanent residence, and that those who breathlessly pursue pleasure are seldom pleased. Nor do men, when they stop to think, want their ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... stir amongst their relatives and friends can easily be understood, and it was found necessary to keep them in hiding. The beadle had been missed from his post, and it was an open secret among his friends and certainly not unknown to the enemy, that he had made a dash for liberty. Under the circumstances he could not remain in Pretoria long, and after a few days of more spying from the church tower he made a second attempt in a different ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt |
