A Quote by Henri Nouwen

The joy that compassion brings is one of the best-kept secrets of humanity. It is a secret known only to a very few people, a secret that has to be rediscovered over and over again.
The thing about secrets is that they are usually best kept by just one person. That was the special thing about secrets. Some people seemed to think that the best way to keep a secret was to tell as many people as possible; what could possibly go wrong for a secret when there were so many people defending it?
Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret; that secrets can only be known in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.
The value of secrets is ever fluctuating although ladies who have been in society for a long time learn that a secret kept can be worth more than a secret told.
A secret may be sometimes best kept by keeping the secret of its being a secret. It is not many years since a State secret of the greatest importance was printed without being divulged, merely by sending it to the press like any other matter, and trusting to the mechanical habits of the persons employed. They printed it piecemeal in ignorance of what it was about.
I've seen a lot of LA and I think it's also a place of secrets: secret houses, secret lives, secret pleasures. And no one is looking to the outside for verification that what they're doing is all right.
Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.
And what if we’d been utterly open? Made jokes about the first wife? What if we’d been that kind of family? Well, I would have been different, surely. But not because I knew the secret. For it wasn’t the secret—the secret that wasn’t a secret anyway—that led to the austerity in our lives. It was the austerity that led to the secret. And what I had been marked by, probably most of all, was the austerity. It had made secrets in my life too. Or silences, anyway, that became secrets. That became lies.
I am not very good at keeping secrets at all! If you want your secret kept do not tell me!
President Obama has appointed a new head of the Secret Service. The new Secret Service director was so excited that he jumped over the White House fence for joy.
We all end up living secret lives. We create what we are willing to admire and admiring what we shouldn't confess to the secret ofour own sin, our own insufficiency, our own sadness. We all end up taking our secrets into the world and handing them over to strangers, only to realize it's often too late to claim them back. The very nature of time passing is sad beyond words. Memories mean they're gone.
Laziness is a secret ingredient that goes into failure. But it's only kept a secret from the person who fails.
I have compassion, I've told you people that over and over again. Enforcing the law overrides my compassion.
It's no secret that me and New York got history. It's no secret. This is no secret. It's already known.
I don't know! Nobody has ever known. Why would Jesus have remained unmarried if he had known the secret? He knew the secret of the kingdom of God, but he did not know the secret of remaining happy in marriage. He remained unmarried. Mahavira, Lao Tzu Chuang Tzu, they all remained unmarried for the simple reason that there is no secret; otherwise these people would have discovered it. They could discover the ultimate - marriage is not such a big thing, it is very shallow - they even fathomed God, but they could not fathom marriage.
I really like knowing secrets, and once I do know that secret, I can keep it. But if I'm on the outside and I don't know the secret, that's a different story. I will try with all my power to get the secret out of the person who knows.
It's very, very difficult I think for us to have a transparent debate about secret programs approved by a secret court issuing secret court orders based on secret interpretations of the law.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!