"Open secret" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where HAVE you lived? Sir John Ballinger is the best gentleman jock in the north country. I could hold him on the flat at my best, but over jumps he's my master. Well, it's an open secret that when he's out of trainin' he drinks hard—strikin' an average, he calls it. He got delirium on Toosday, and has been ragin' like a devil ever since. His room is above this. The doctors say that it is all up with the old dear unless some food is got into him, but as he lies in ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 beautifully when ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... open secret that when a famous ventriloquist was offered the O.B.E. for his services in popularising the Navy, he refused the coveted distinction on the ground that it would be derogatory to a Prince ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various
... society do except defend itself, even by the death penalty? Remember, the Church does not kill. It never has; it never will. It is society that puts to death. And it is certainly true to say that theologians, as a whole, would undoubtedly abolish the death penalty to-morrow if they could. It's an open secret that the Holy Father would do away with it to-morrow if ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... abyss of the unknown and unknowable; seems so insufficient to do more than illuminate the imperfections that cannot be remedied, the aspirations that cannot be realized, of man's own nature. But in this sadness, this consciousness of the limitation of man, this sense of an open secret which he cannot penetrate, lies the essence of all religion; and the attempt to embody it in the forms furnished by the intellect is the origin ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... said to have determined Yoritomo. He disclosed all his ambitions to Hojo Tokimasa, and found in him an able coadjutor. Yoritomo now began to open secret communications with several of the military families in Izu and the neighbouring provinces. In making these selections and approaches, the Minamoto exile was guided and assisted by Tokimasa. Confidences were not by any means confined to men of Minamoto lineage. The kith ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... justly celebrated for her beauty and charm (and her endless charities), of blameless repute, and one of the most popular women in English society, should yet have conceived a very warm regard for my poor cousin; indeed, it was an open secret in the family of "Lord Cray" that she had done so. But for them she would have taken the whole ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... is absolutely known against her. On the contrary, she occupies a rather high position in society. It is a sort of open secret that Baron Arnheim left her the greater portion of his immense fortune. Beyond that ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... combined armies of five kings, flushed with recent victory, to rescue one 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 FRIEND ...
— The Chocolate Soldier - Heroism—The Lost Chord of Christianity • C. T. Studd
... 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 ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... artificial devices. If the belief is not that social arrangements have been divinely ordered thus or thus, then it is that they have been made thus or thus by kings, or if not by kings, then by parliaments. That they have come about by small accumulated changes not contemplated by rulers is an open secret which only of late has been recognized by a few, and is still unperceived by the many,—educated as well as uneducated. Tho the turning of the land into a food-producing surface, cleared, fenced, drained, and covered with farming appliances, has been achieved by men working for individual profit, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... she was also his darling of them all, but this was a perfectly open secret between them, and had been such as long as Nan could remember. She laughed up at him with tender impudence ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... It has revealed something of the might of reason, and given new grounds for the faith, which in all ages has inspired the effort to know,—the faith that the world is an intelligible structure, meant to be penetrated by the thought of man. Can it be that nature is an "open secret," but that man, and he alone, must remain an enigma? Or does he not rather bear within himself the key to every problem which he solves, and is it not his thought which penetrates the secrets of nature? The success of science, in reducing ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... of the ballot. 'There has been a meeting between Bright and Lord John,' was Lord Houghton's comment, 'but I don't know that it has led to anything except a more temperate tone in Bright's last speeches.' Mr. Cobden, it is an open secret, would not have refused to serve under Lord John, but his hostility to Lord Palmerston's policy was too pronounced for him now to accept the offer of a seat in the new Cabinet. He assured Lord John that if he had been at the head of the Administration the result would have been different. ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... cubs to the plash of yeasty waterfalls that leapt and whimpered to be in human service, but wherein the otter played all day unscared; crags where the eagle nested; defiles that echoed the howl of wolves unhunted, though the very stones cried out their open secret of immeasurable wealth; narrow vales where the mountain cabin sent up its blue thread of smoke, and in its lonely patch strong weeds and emaciated corn and cotton pushed one another down among the big clods; and vast cliffs from whose bushy brows ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... founders of Sorosis, perhaps the most noted woman's club in existence, was its President for many years, and its Honorary President at the time of her death. The cause which led to the founding of Sorosis is an open secret. Women were ignored at the Charles Dickens reception; this was not to be tolerated, and in consequence of this affront Sorosis came into being, an effectual protest against any similar indifference in all time to come. Of the growth of the club movement in the United ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... could scarcely be claimed that he was a farmer—indeed, in those days there was nothing to farm away up among those desolate hills—and therefore Stokoe made no attempt to pose as anything in the bucolic line; it was a pretty open secret that his real occupation was neither more nor less than smuggling. But he had never yet been caught while engaged in running a contraband cargo, and, whatever reason there may have been for suspicion, no revenue officer had ever had courage to make a raid on his house. There came, however, ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... Maurice. Every 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 ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... melt suddenly into little boys, and try to squirm and run back to hide their heads in their mothers' skirts. It is an open secret that starchy, modern women often long to wilt back into droopy musk roses, that climb over gates and things, but they don't let each other. When I feel myself getting soluble, I write it out to Jane and I get a bracing cold wave ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... as I have also said, that ambassadorial atmosphere can be best expressed on the word irony, sometimes a rather tragic irony. At any tea-party or talk in the street, between the rival leaders, there is a natural tendency to that sort of wit which consists in veiled allusion to a very open secret. Each mail feels that there are heavy forces behind a small point, as the weight of the fencer is behind the point of the rapier. And the point can be yet more pointed because the politics of the city, when I was there, included several men with a taste and talent for such polished intercourse; ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... to any kind of publicity has kept the facts of his life in the background, but it is an open secret that much of the longing of Jude for a college education was drawn from his own boyhood. It is also a matter of record that as a boy he served as amanuensis for many servant maids, writing the love letters which they dictated. In this way, before he knew the real ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... 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 |
