Quotes About Merton

I got the idea that Merton was bright, funny, holy, and altogether unique. But there was something else about the show that drew me.

Merton said many times that when it comes to spirituality, experience is the place to start.

To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions.

Science is public, not private, knowledge.

If you want to pick a role model for designing a group's practical rules of engagement, you can't do better than Merton. To start, he coined the phrase "role model," along with "self-fulfilling prophecy," "reference group," "unintended consequences," and "focus group." He founded the science of sociology and was the first sociologist awarded the National Medal of Science.

In the western part of England lived a gentleman of large fortune, whose name was Merton.

If Wall Street is to learn just one lesson from the Long-Term debacle, it should be that. The next time a Merton proposes an elegant model to manage risks and foretell odds, the next time a computer with a perfect memory of the past is said to quantify risks in the future, investors should run—and quickly—the other way. On Wall Street, though, few lessons remain learned.

My main interest, however, was in economics, not law.

In fact, I don't watch a lot of contemporary comedy for fear of being influenced by it.

Many books have been written on Thomas Merton already.

For the contemplative there is no cogito ("I think") and no ergo ("therefore") but only SUM, I AM. Not in the sense of a futile assertion of our individuality as ultimately real, but in the humble realization of our mysterious being as persons in whom God dwells, with infinite sweetness and inalienable power.

There are ways that seem to men to be good, the end whereof is in the depths of hell.

and because they saw that I myself liked my own subject matter, they tolerated it, and even did a certain amount of work for me without too much complaint.

We can say that, for Merton, religion refers to our deepest reality which lies hidden in our innate propensity for union with God. Our life, in other words, simply makes no sense whatsoever except to the extent it is directed toward union with God, that is, to the extent that it is authentically religious.

The solution Merton suggests is that we should quit keeping score altogether and surrender ourselves with all our sinfulness to God who sees neither the score nor the scorekeeper but only his child redeemed by Christ.

One of two things was happening. Either Merton College had folded over the summer and been too cheap to spend a stamp to tell me, or the other girls had seen me struggling up the long flight of steps and locked the door.

I was born in Boston, Massachusetts on May 16, 1923, the only child of Joel and Sylvia Miller.

Buechner is a worthy member of the great prose stylists: Pascal, Newman, and Merton, who have harnessed their art to a passionate religious faith.

Is science a fundamentally cooperative enterprise, or is it a fundamentally competitive one in which scientists are out for personal advancement? According to Hull (and also Merton), science runs on a combination of cooperation and competition. Neither is fundamental, and the special features of science are due to an interaction between the two. This interaction arises from the reward system found in science and the context in which the reward system operates.

My expertise was in public finance, particularly corporate taxation, since I had worked at the US Treasury.