If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.

How can you expect another to keep a secret if we have been unable to keep it ourselves?

My son, whoever wishes to keep a secret, must hide from us that he possesses one. Self complaisance over the concealed destroys its concealment.

Can you keep secrets? Can you know a thing and never say it again?

I think we keep the secrets from ourselves. Because we have experienced a moment when you look into a person’s eyes and you see that how they are looking at you is dehumanising. In that moment, all your humanity is lost. And it’s unbearable. We keep that secret from our daughters, because we don’t want them to be seen in that way.

Secrets have power. And that power diminishes when they are shared, so they are best kept and kept well. Sharing secrets, real secrets, important ones, with even one other person, will change them. Writing them down is worse, because who can tell how many eyes might see them inscribed on paper, no matter how careful you might be with it. So it's really best to keep your secrets when you have them, for their own good, as well as yours.

Don't call yourself a secret
unless you mean to keep it.

He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.

Keep your own secret, and get out other people's.

How shall we hope that another person will keep our secret if we do not keep it ourselves.

Comment prétendons-nous qu'un autre puisse garder notre secret, si nous ne pouvons le garder nous-mêmes?

Never reveal all of yourself to other people; hold back something in reserve so that people are never quite sure if they really know you.

A secret is a strange thing. There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone knows about, the sort you need at least two people for. One to keep it. One to never know. The second is a harder kind of secret: one you keep from yourself. Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid. And then there is the third kind of secret, the most hidden kind. A secret no one knows about. Perhaps it was known once, but was taken to the grave. Or maybe it is a useless mystery, arcane and lonely, unfound because no one ever looked for it. Sometimes, some rare times, a secret stays undiscovered because it is something too big for the mind to hold. It is too strange, too vast, too terrifying to contemplate. All of us have secrets in our lives. We’re keepers or keptfrom, players or played. Secrets and cockroaches — that’s what will be left at the end of it all.