"The Penalty Of Success Is..."

"The penalty of success is to be bored by people who used to snub you."

Viscountess Nancy Astor

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Thomas Merton was once asked to write a chapter for a book entitled  "Secrets of Success."  He replied:  "If it so happened that I had once written a best-seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same again.  If I had a message for my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this:  Be  anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing:  success." 

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The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word "success" - is our national disease. William James