Quotes about vocation

Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.

The genius inside a person wants activity. It’s connected to the stars it’s connected to a spark and it wants to burn and it wants to make and it wants to create and it has gifts to give. That is the nature of inner genius.

Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not have talent one can be called and not know how to go.

There is something in the depths of our being that hungers for wholeness and finality. Because we are made for eternal life, we are made for an act that gathers up all the powers and capacities of our being and offers them simultaneously and forever to God. The blind spiritual instinct that tells us obscurely that our owns lives have a particular importance and purpose, and which urges us to find out our vocation, seeks in so doing to bring us to a decision that will dedicate our lives irrevocab

He does not call those who are worthy, but those whom He will.

Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.

He was like a man thinking on an abstract subject all the time.

A young mark twain on the make: "I can't turn in inkstand into Aladdin's lamp.

You have to pay for this view (onto which he looks while writing), so our expenses keep us pretty motivated to write. It's a vicious cycle.

For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is constantly ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight.

The creative impulse can be killed, but it cannot be taught...What a teacher can do...in working with children, is to give the flame enough oxygen so that it can burn. As far as I'm concerned, this providing of oxygen is one of the noblest of all vocations.

Indifference destroys vocation unlike any other intangible force, for the reason that it shakes the very core of our motivation for doing what we do.

The most important thing in life is to know the purpose of your calling, your vocation

I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.

Suffice to say, the dream writer had a way of phrasing things. She could depict the curve of a cucumber, the shape of a sunbeam, the endearing, velvety tilt of a peach, in just such a way that she earned her living selling dreams. One simply made a selection, read it in solitude, and let it percolate till sleep. People swore they fell directly into her renderings, and one even asked if the dream writer could write a dream of dreaming forever. The dream writer could not do this, but she hired dre

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.

Pay attention to what you wish you were doing when you're doing something else.

Lincoln told a family friend that his father taught him to work, but never learned him to love it.

Even his own speeches bored him.

One of the great wonders of Christianity is that you were born into your times, to set your times aright.

You just became the most interesting person at this party. I don't think anyone here has worked an honest day in their lives.

Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one’s true business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into an uncongenial calling.

For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.

Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation, or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts...

Each of you has a personal vocation which He has given you for your own joy and sanctity. When a person is conquered by the fire of His gaze, no sacrifice seems too great to follow Him and give Him the best of ourselves. This is what the saints have always done, spreading the light of the Lord ... and transforming the world into a welcoming home for everyone.

Fast rather than slow, more rather than less--this flashy "development" is linked directly to society's impending collapse. It has only served to separate man from nature. Humanity must stop indulging the desire for material possessions and personal gain and move instead toward spiritual awareness.Agriculture must change from large mechanical operations to small farms attached only to life itself. Material life and diet should be given a simple place. If this is done, work becomes pleasant, and

There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.

At his funeral the priest's words applied signally to him: 'The Christian Brothers are a body of men who live without luxury, labour without emolument, and die without notice, that they might stamp God's image on the soul of youth. That surely is a splendid vocation.

Education at a deep level means to ‘lead out’ what is trying to be born from within. The job of a true teacher is to help awaken the inner pupil that has its own way of being and unique way of perceiving the world.

...young people know very little about themselves and their abilities. When the day comes on which they discover their real strong points and their weaknesses, it is often to late. They have usually been drawn into the current of a particular vocation, and have given too much energy to the preparation for a specific achievement to change the whole life-plan once more. The entire scheme of education gives to the individual little chance to find himself.

The real education is when you awaken and nourish and guide the inner spirit, this inner genius. The community grows from the giving of the gifts of the people in it, which is really giving from the genius.

I never heard that it had been anybody’s business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to him. He had been adapted to the verses and had learnt the art of making them to such perfection. I did doubt whether Richard would not have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his studying them quite so much.

Here is a truth that most teachers will not tell you, even if they know it: Good training is a continual friend and a solace; it helps you now, and assures you of help in the future. Good education is a continual pain in the neck, and assures you always of more of the same.

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn't a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have

A great dread fell on him, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken. An overwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace by Bilbo's side in Rivendell filled all his heart. At last with an effort he spoke, and wondered to hear his own words, as if some other will was using his small voice. "I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way.

Who is willing to be satisfied with a job that expresses all his limitations? He will accept such work only as a 'means of livelihood' while he waits to discover his 'true vocation'. The world is full of unsuccessful businessmen who still secretly believe they were meant to be artists or writers or actors in the movies.

My dear Mr FitzGeorge!' cried Lady Slane. 'You really mustn't talk as though my life had been a tragedy. I had everything that most women would covet: position, comfort, children, and a husband I loved. I had nothing to complain of - nothing.''Except that you were defrauded of the one thing that mattered. Nothing matters to an artist except the fulfilment of his gift. You know that as well as I do. Frustrated, he grows crooked like a tree twisted into an unnatural shape. All meaning goes out of

A live-in domestic worker: "You are never sure that your soul is your own except when you are out of the house.

Duty was not untinged by ambition.

Just because you can't act EVERYWHERE doesn't mean you don't act ANYWHERE. – Madeleine Albright

Each life involves an essential errand; not simply the task of survival, but a life-mission embedded in the soul from the beginning.

I've got to tell you that my vocation, my true calling, is serving others. Medicine is my avocation; it's part of how I answer my calling, but it's not all of it. I minister to bodies, but I also minister to hearts and souls.

To become nobody but your true self and to struggle against the tide of sameness and the false security of simply fitting in is a fight worth having. To become oneself by contributing one’s native gifts and talents to this troubled world: that is the job to keep applying for and a work worth spending an entire life doing.

For it is beautiful only to do the thing we are meant for

For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthf

If you can't give it all you've got, don't bother.

Vocation” comes from the Latin vocare (to call) and means the work a man is called to by God.There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of society, say, or the superego, or self-interest.The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need to do and (b) that the world needs to have done. If you find your work rewarding, you have presumably met requirement (a),

What do we advertise about You by how we serve? Do we reflect the belief shown in Jesus’ parable that You are a hard master taking what isn’t Yours? Forgive us for even brief lapses into such churlishness. Or, do we reflect a joy in serving that radiates from an intimate and time-tested knowledge of the goodness of the One we serve? Paul and Daniel were confident of this sovereign goodness even when they were prisoners rather than courtiers, and we can likewise tap into a joy that defies circums

Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.

Making money isn't hard in itself,' he complained. 'What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.

The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable.... It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that "to work is to pray." (pg. 258, The Idea of a Local Economy)

If you want to impress someone, simply make up a vocation and preface it with the words “molecular” or “theoretical” (as in “molecular biologist” or “theoretical physicist”). After you do this no one will question the veracity of anything you say—whether it is related to your putative vocation or not.

Faith gives you a concept of the dignity and worth of all work, even simple work, without which work could bore you.

We are on location, this is not a vacation.

Films are not primarily an entertainment medium. They are weapons. If you understand that, then you are ready to pursue filmmaking as a vocation.

Everything. Everywhere. Every moment. That is the scope of God's call on our lives, and that is the dignity our lives enjoy.

Often we want to be somewhere other than where we are, to even to be someone other than who we are. We tend to compare ourselves constantly with others and wonder why we are not as rich, as intelligent, as simple, as generous, or as saintly as they are. Such comparisons make us feel guilty, ashamed, or jealous. It is very important to realize that our vocation is hidden in where we are and who we are. We are unique human beings, each with a call to realize in life what nobody else can, and to re

Our strongest gifts are usually those we are barely aware of possessing. They are a part of our God-given nature, with us from the moment we drew first breath, and we are no more conscious of having them them than we are of breathing.

The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious.

Christians ought to have a different approach to business. As believers, we should view work as both service and a form of worship.

The curse of the fall didn't affect only manual work, as we often seem to think. Excessive ambiguity that prevent us from figuring out how to navigate is really a form of confusion. Overload is one of the forms that frustration takes. The inordinate challenges we face in knowledge work can be traced to the fall just as much as the challenges in manual work. Send it especially lies behind the villain of lack of fulfillment. The reason we lack fulfillment is because we aren't fulfilling our true p

We feel unfulfilled when there is a gap between what is most important to us, the realm of personal leadership, and what we are actually doing with our time, the realm of personal management. You are satisfied with your day when there is a match between what you value and how you spend your time.

Our task is to carry the Lord's peace into every situation, into every duty.

Shoddy work is not just shoddy work. It's a failure of love.

M'Lord, I know from history that once upon a time in a much earlier Church, a vocation to the priesthood meant a call from the bishop, not necessarily a call from God. And I heard the Bishop of Rome himself call you to be that which you have now become by ordination and consecration.

I became an actor because it was my clumsy attempt to become myself.

A true Christian lives and labors on earth not for himself but for his neighbor. Therefore the whole spirit of his life him impels him to do even that which he needs not do, but which is profitable and necessary for his neighbor.

If we are unfaithful to true self, we will extract a price from others. We will make promises we cannot keep, build houses from flimsy stuff, conjure dreams that devolve into nightmares, and other people will suffer - if we are unfaithful to true self.

Cause every task of your day to be a sacred ministry to the Lord. however mundane your duties, for you they are a sacrament.

I always like to be in the presence of people who are good at and love their jobs, Irrespective of their jobs.

Celebration comes when the common features of life are redeemed.

It's a gift of tranquility when your adult desires mesh with your childhood background. I don't quite know why mine didn't, although I think books, again, are partly to blame.

Teddy Roosevelt "had relished "every hour" of every day as president. Indeed, (he was) fearing the "dull thud" he would experience upon returning to private life.

The rhythms of the game complemented the lifestyle he preferred.

Our problem as Americans -- at least, among my race and gender -- is that we resist the very idea of limits, regarding limits of all sorts as temporary and regrettable impositions on our lives.

The only Christian work is good work well done.

There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.

Your calling is to be faithful to God where you are, and in doing this all work is sacred, spiritual, and worthy of your full attention and energy. When you get to work, you are not entering a secular environment as much as you are bringing the sacred into the world by following Christ wherever you are.

Speaking of Newton but also commenting more broadly on education and the Enlightenment: "I have seen a professor of mathematics only because he was great in his vocation, buried like a king who had done well by his subjects.

Vocation at its deepest level is, 'This is something I can't not do, for reasons I'm unable to explain to anyone else and don't fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling.

The point of the calling was, quite simply, that it was appointed by God to serve neighbors. If along the way some self-fulfillment came as well, there was nothing wrong with that, but it was hardly the point of the calling.

Nothing's work unless you'd rather be doing something else.

At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature!

A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests. Thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment and self-realization slowly crushes a person.

Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavours, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavour, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God's calling, can matter forever.

Calling resists privatization by insisting on the totality of faith. Calling resists politicization by demanding a tension with every human allegiance and association. Calling resists polarization by requiring an attitude toward, and action in, society that is inevitably transforming because it is constantly engaged. Grand Christian movements will rise and fall. Grand campaigns will be mounted and grand coalitions assembled. But all together such coordinated efforts will never match the influenc

Ah, God, it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling hadone all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years aBarrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty aSoldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and fifty a Judge! AllRoads are fine Roads, beloved Sister, none more thananother, so that with one Life to spend I am a Manbare-bumm'd at Taylors with Cash for but one pair ofBreeches, or a Scholar at Brookstalls with Money for asingle Book: to choose ten were no Trouble; to choose one,impossible! All Tr

If you are going to find work worth doing - a vocation to fulfill and challenge you - you will have to encounter a reality bigger than yourself. It may not be what others say it should be or what you think, but it will come if you are looking for it... At times, the work you're called to do will be hard and confusing, but if you press in, you will see the purpose behind the pain. You will see how the whole experience is causing you to grow. And you will thank God for the whole journey.

Passion does not translate easily into good income.

If it was bliss to be alive, to hunt was rapture.

Don't sweat the small stuff" doesn't work with parenting small children. They only work in small stuff. They aren't making company decisions. They are deciding whether to use a crayon on the wall. – Bill Klein

Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.

No matter what office LBJ assumed he lifted greater than when he found it.

Only God can make the common sacred.

it is the general rule of the moral universe that those men prosper who do their work with all their hearts, while those are almost certain to fail who go to their labour leaving half their hearts behind them.

Robert Kennedy was inspired to take on organized crime by watching the landmark movie On the Waterfront.

He cross-examined his very wine when he had nothing else at hand.

When a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with singular dexterity; but, at the same time, he loses the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work. His every day becomes more of adroit and less industrious; so that it may be said of him, that, in proportion as the workman improves, the man is degraded. Alexis de Tocqueville