"Open secret" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... was a penetrative man, and more hidden things than his friend's ailment had been an open secret to his keen eye. He did not care to know which one of the butterflies was the fluttering object of Kenkenes' bounteous love, for Hotep knew that those high-born Memphian women, who were openly partial to the handsome young sculptor, loved him for his comeliness and his silken tongue alone. It would ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... upon this point is not less striking—it may be added, not less solemn. It is an open secret, to be read in a hundred analogies from the world around, that of the millions of possible entrants for advancement in any department of Nature the number ultimately selected for preferment is small. Here also "many ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... first by separating from itself particularised, and then by return into itself individualised, the whole being what Hegel characterises as Der Process des Geistes, "The Process of the Spirit." Something like this is what Dr. Stirling calls "The Secret of Hegel," and an open secret it is, for he finds it pervading the whole system; "open where you will in Hegel," he says, "you find him always engaged in saying pretty well the same thing"; always identity by otherness passing into selfness, or making that for itself which is at first in itself;—a philosophy which ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Carlton, and one year he found his name among the Birthday Honours with a K.C.M.G. For him everybody predicted a brilliant future. The Press gave prominence to his speeches, and to his house in Park Street came Cabinet Ministers and most of the well-known men of his party. Indeed, it was an open secret in a certain circle that he had been promised a seat in the Cabinet ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... bride either found out some secret the prince had kept from her (which is what people believe), or else there was a mysterious row the first hour after the wedding. Anyhow, something happened; he went off the same day and left her with her mother. Afterward, he came back; but it was an open secret that the two were no more than strangers, or, you might say, polite acquaintances, though they lived at opposite ends of his palace in Rome, which her money restored, and his country place near Frascati. There was never the least ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... a month it 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 ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... come home, and she was anxious to wear it to meeting in the hope that he might admire her in it. Should she betray this artless preening and trimming of her maiden plumage, which, though, like a bird's, an open secret of nature, must nevertheless be kept sacred by an impulse of modest concealment and deceit towards the one for whose sake it ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... acknowledged official position in the country of his residence, but it was an open secret that those responsible for the real direction of affairs sought his counsel on nearly every step that they meditated, and that his counsel was very rarely disregarded. Some of the shrewdest and most successful enactments of the ruling ...
— When William Came • Saki
... tell you, is the key to the situation. In the first place, if the country is to be properly developed as sheep and cattle range, the valley will furnish the farming land upon which hay for winter use can be raised, and it also furnishes some good winter range. Moreover, it is now an open secret that the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad proposes building a branch line through that country and into the San Juan Valley. No surveys have been made, but it is certain that the road must follow ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... That "secret"—an open secret for him—explains this side of his character. As he read everything in its light, so it is only in its light that we can properly understand him. I think that the following quotation from a letter to the Rev. F. H. Atkinson, accompanying a copy of "Alice" for his little daughter ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... this singular document will, I think, be based by most thinking men, not upon what it is, but upon that of which it is a sign. It is an open secret, that the memorial is put forth as a counterblast to a manifestation of opinion of a contrary character, on the part of certain members of the same ecclesiastical body, who therefore have, as I suppose, an equal ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... followed her. There was no staying the township then. He was the last of the active participants in the tragic mystery to leave the place, and it was an open secret he was going to join the one for whom they all felt deeply. So they made up in his send-off for the restraint they had exercised upon themselves when she bade ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... The open secret flashes on the brain, As if one almost guessed it, almost knew Whence we have sailed and ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... no pretense of mourning for him. It was an open secret that they had quarreled like the proverbial cat and dog. Charles Holland and his wife had naturally sided with Benjamin, and Naomi fought her battles single-handed. After her husband's death, she managed to farm alone, and made it pay. When the mysterious malady which ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... 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
... not unnaturally, perhaps, stirred the Marquis's ire. When he was told, however, that "Dutch Wannigan," before departing for the trial at Mandan, had received money from Joe Ferris, his suspicions appeared confirmed, for Joe was known to be Roosevelt's close friend, and it was an open secret that Roosevelt was financing Joe's venture in storekeeping. If his suspicions needed further confirmation, they seemed to get it when a little, black-haired Irishman, named Jimmie McShane, otherwise known as "Dynamite Jimmie," received a sum of money from Joe Ferris and appeared ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... it wasn't an open secret any longer that Burton was editing the "Life and Letters of Ford Lankester," with a Critical Introduction. The announcement had appeared in the papers a day or two before Wrackham's death. He had had his eye on Burton. He may have wavered between ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... Hamburg publisher. When Spinoza heard, some time later, that a Dutch translation of this work was being prepared, he earnestly beseeched his friends to forestall its publication (which they did) because only its Latin dress saved it from being officially proscribed. It was then an open secret who the author was. Spinoza's personal rule to incur as little official displeasure as possible made him abandon his final literary project entertained in 1675. When he began negotiations for the publication of the Ethics a rumor ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza |
