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The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.


Thomas Merton

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THOMAS MERTON Everyone of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self..We are not very good at recognizing ...
THOMAS MERTON We thank Him less by words than by the serene happiness of silent acceptance. It is our emptiness in...
THOMAS MERTON The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not t...
THOMAS MERTON Please do not look only at the dark side

All the newspapers in the free world explain why...
THOMAS MERTON The story of the Fall tells us in mythical language that "original sin" is not simply a stigma arbit...
THOMAS MERTON Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.
THOMAS MERTON The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole...
THOMAS MERTON If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own,...
THOMAS MERTON The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on th...
THOMAS MERTON When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your ti...
THOMAS MERTON I read every book about Buster Keaton and Chaplin to see how they worked - it's all about dedica...
PAUL MERTON There's something magical about film, it's the ultimate for me, because it's kind of per...
PAUL MERTON So everybody has some information. The function of the markets is to aggregate that information, eva...
MERTON MILLER Everyone recognizes that's a joke because obviously the number and shape of the pieces doesn'...
MERTON MILLER I'm always amazed to hear of air crash victims so badly mutilated that they have to be identifie...
PAUL MERTON My school days were the happiest days of my life; which should give you some indication of the miser...
PAUL MERTON As an economics undergraduate, I also worked on a part-time basis in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a...
MERTON MILLER You only need to make one big score in finance to be a hero forever.
MERTON MILLER I was trying to organise my DVDs into a sort of chronological order, and I am afraid that it all tra...
PAUL MERTON When I wake up on a Monday morning and I realise I don't have to go and work at the civil servic...
PAUL MERTON If you became a comedian in the '80s, you had to work the circuit and make people laugh. Canned ...
PAUL MERTON When I turned about 12 or 13, I realised that being funny wasn't about remembering jokes. It was...
PAUL MERTON All disc jockeys are without talent. Noel Edmonds - I can't stand Noel Edmonds.
PAUL MERTON Most people might just as well buy a share of the whole market, which pools all the information, tha...
MERTON MILLER When I used to do the Edinburgh Festival, there was a bunch of guys selling fresh oysters and I'...
PAUL MERTON My research interests since then have shifted strongly towards the economic and regulatory problems ...
MERTON MILLER The thing about improvisation is that it's not about what you say. It's listening to what ot...
PAUL MERTON When things are difficult, awful, stressful, the thing that always gets you through is a sense of hu...
PAUL MERTON Beginning with a trip out to Ellis Island, I saw for myself where thousands of European immigrants t...
PAUL MERTON We thought it would have significance for practice but nothing of the magnitude that's occurred over...
ROBERT MERTON