Vocation Quotes

Its authors meant it to be ... a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack. ~ Abraham Lincoln

American Christianity is a story of perpetual upheavals in churches and individual lives. Starting with the extraordinary conversion experience, our lives are motivated by a constant expectation for the Next Big Thing. We're growing bored with the ordinary means of God's grace, attending church week in and week out. Doctrines and disciplines that have shaped faithful Christian witness in the past are often marginalized or substituted with newer fashions or methods. The new and improved may dazzle us for a moment, but soon they have become "so last year". Michael Horton, Ordinary, 16 ~ Michael S. Horton

The Sinai covenant itself, then, is a law-covenant. The land is given to Israel, but for the purpose of fulfilling its covenantal vocation. Remaining in the land is there fore conditional on Israel's personal performance of the stipulations that people swore at Sinai ... The ultimate promise of a worldwide family of Abraham
sinners justified and glorified in a renewed creation
is unconditional in its basis, while the continuing existence of the national theocracy as a type of that everlasting covenant depended on Israel's obedience ... The Decalogue and Joshua 24 fit this suzerainty pattern, but as Mendenhall observe, "it can readily be seen that the covenant with Abraham (and Noah) is of completely different form." P.15 ~ Michael S. Horton

Duty was not untinged by ambition. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

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

Vocation is more a calling than a job ~ Andreas Widmer The Pope And The CEO

Storytellers have as profound a purpose as any who are charged to guide and transform human lives. I knew it as an ancient discipline and vocation to which everyone is called. ~ Nancy Mellon

I suspect that every teacher hears the same complaints, but that, being seldom a practicing author, he tends to dismiss them as out of his field, or to see in them evidence that the troubled student has not the true vocation. Yet it is these very pupils who are most obviously gifted who suffer from these disabilities, and the more sensitively organized they are the higher the hazard seems to them. Your embryo journalist or hack writer seldom asks for help of any sort; he is off after agents and editors while his more serious brother-in-arms is suffering the torments of the damned because of his insufficiencies. Yet instruction in writing is oftenest aimed at the oblivious tradesman of fiction, and the troubles of the artist are dismissed or overlooked. ~ Dorothea Brande

To be active is the primary vocation of man. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

It all boils down to what I would most like to do as a musician. Put songs on people's lips instead of just in their ears. ~ Pete Seeger

Considering myself called of my God to instruct the ignorant, comfort the sorrowful, confirm the weak, and rebuke the proud; by tongue and lively voice in these corrupt days rather than to compose books for the age to come, seeing that so much is written, and yet so little well observed, I decree to contain myself within the bounds of that vocation whereunto I found myself especially called. ~ John Knox

I still don't know if I'm good enough or if it's a calling or a vocation or something, but the talent part is out. My desire to do it is undoubted. I just love doing this. ~ Chris Isaak

An educator's most important task, one might say his holy duty, is to see to it that no child is discouraged at school, and that a child who enters school already discouraged regains his self-confidence through his school and his teacher. This goes hand in hand with the vocation of the educator, for education is possible only with children who look hopefully and joyfully upon the future. ~ Alfred Adler

...as soon as you think of yourself as teaching contemplation to others, you make another mistake. No one teaches contemplation except God, who gives it. The best you can do is write something that will serve as an occasion for someone else to realize what God wants of him. ~ Thomas Merton

In the world of the Bible, one's identity and one's vocation are all bound up in who one's father is. Men are called "son of" all of their lives (for instance, "the sons of Zebedee" or "Joshua, the son of Nun"). There are no guidance counselors in ancient Canaan or first-century Capernaum, helping "teenagers" decide what they want "to be" when they "grow up." A young man watches his father, learns from him, and follows in his vocational steps. This is why "the sons of Zebedee" are right there with their father when Jesus finds them, "in their boat mending the nets" (Mark 1:19-20).
The inheritance was the engine of survival, passed from father to son, an economic pact between generations. To lose one's inheritance was to pilfer for survival, to become someone's slave. ~ Russell D. Moore

A philosophy of work is essential if we would be whole men, holy men, healthy men, joyous men. A certain amount of goods is necessary for a man to lead a good life, and we have to make that kind of society where it is easier for men to be good. ~ Dorothy Day

The gift of singleness is more a vocation than an empowerment, although to be sure God is faithful in supporting those He calls. ~ John R.W. Stott

Many people don't understand the difference between a vocation and your own idea about something. A vocation is a call-one you don't necessarily want. The only thing I ever wanted to be was an actress. But I was called by God. ~ Dolores Hart

Paradise had four rivers that watered the earth ... and howsoever neglected by many, they make glad the city of God. So Bernard sweetly: Eternal life is granted to us in election, promised in our vocation, sealed in our justification, possessed in our glorification. Conclude then, faithfully to thy own soul. I believe, therefore I am justified; I am justified, therefore I am sanctified; I am sanctified, therefore I am called; I am called, therefore I am elected; I am elected, therefore I shall be saved. Oh! settled comfort of joy, which ten thousand devils shall never make void. ~ Thomas Adams

The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. 'Faking it' in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one's nature, and it will always fail. ~ Parker J. Palmer

Is that which science calls the "psyche" not merely a question-mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, now and again allowing strange and unseizable potencies to act upon him and to remove him, as if upon the wings of the night, from the level of common humanity to that of a more personal vocation? ~ C. G. Jung

There is no doubt that the biblical concept of the Kingdom calls for a ministry to the suffering, the imprisoned, the oppressed, the hungry and whomever is dehumanized by an unjust society. In abstract, almost all of us can affirm this with enthusiasm. When it is the vocation, however, of one of our number to make this Gospel imperative, a matter demanding and requiring us to change our comfortable ways, then many of us fall away. The prophet has never been popular among his other contemporaries. He has been stoned, beheaded, crucified and shot. If not killed, we have been all too ready to vilify him or her in the name of God, little realizing that it may well be God who sent the prophet to challenge our complacency. ~ Urban T. Holmes III

I did a little theatre work after that and the following year I got another part in a television series. Then it was almost to the end of the year before I got more work. That was coming to terms with the reality of the vocation I had chosen. ~ Karl Urban

Call me territorial or narcissistic, but I avoid novels about people who share my vocation. ~ Julia Glass

You will know your vocation by the joy that it brings you. You will know. You will know when it's right. ~ Dorothy Day

I am a great artist and I know it. It's because of what I am that I have endured so much suffering, so as to pursue my vocation, otherwise I would consider myself a rogue - which is what many people think I am, for that matter. ~ Paul Gauguin

Film is something that came later into my life. I had a Jesuit education, and I consider acting and the theater as kind of a calling - a vocation. ~ Michael Moriarty

But I believe that even without the consideration of his family he would find it impossible to live abroad. He would be a man without a purpose; for his purpose, his vocation, is Egypt. ~ Ahdaf Soueif

If our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts. ~ Timothy Keller

When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives. ~ Albert Camus

The ambitious man has never found his true vocation ... ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

In so far as the intention of education is to train the child for a vocation it is a millstone around his neck. ~ John Carroll

...most writers, and most other artists, too, are primarily motivated in their desperate vocation by a desire to find and to separate truth from the complex of lies and evasions they live in, and I think that this impulse is what makes their work not so much a profession as a vocation, a true calling. ~ Tennessee Williams

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. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right. If what comes out of it are stories, then it is my vocation to believe in them and in the fact that they'll interest people and maybe affect their lives. ~ Etgar Keret

May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants-while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy. ~ George Washington

Of course, to be a mother and a housewife is a vocation of a very high kind. But I simply felt that it was not the whole of my vocation. I knew that I also wanted a career. A phrase that Irene Ward, MP for Tynemouth, and I often used was that 'while the home must always be the centre of one's life, it should not be the boundary of one's ambitions'. ~ Margaret Thatcher

The vocation of being a 'protector' [ ... ] means protecting all creation, the beauty of the created world, as the Book of Genesis tells us and as Saint Francis of Assisi showed us [ ... ] In the end, everything has been entrusted to our protection, and all of us are responsible for it. Be protectors of God's gifts! ~ Pope Francis

I think teaching should be a vocation, and they should be paid more for it. ~ James Nesbitt

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. ~ Parker J. Palmer

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 irrevocably to their true purpose. The man who loses this sense of his own personal destiny, and who renounces all hope of having any kind of vocation in life has either lost all hope of happiness or else has entered upon some mysterious vocation that God alone can understand. ~ Thomas Merton

My life's been too much of a self-created vocation. And there are times when I think I've done everything in the name of defiance. ~ Anne Rice

What if followers of Christ stopped looking for work in places where the MOST number of Christians Christians lived and started looking for work places where the LEAST Christians lived? ~ David Platt

It is not sociologists who provide insights but photographers of our sort who are observers at the very center of their times. I have always felt strongly that this was the photographer's true vocation. ~ Brassai

The sportsman knows that a sport is a recreation, a game, an amusement and a pastime, but his eyes are fixed on a higher goal, on the most important thing in his life, which is his education or his vocation. ~ Avery Brundage

Our vocation, to be beautiful, must be full of thought for others. ~ Mother Teresa

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can't get out. ~ Richard M. Nixon

But it would have been a surprise, not only to katherine herself, if some magic watch could have taken count of the moments spent in an entirely different occupation from her ostensible one.Sitting with faded papers before her, she took part in a series of scenes such as the taming of wild ponies upon the American prairies, or the conduct of a vast ship in a hurricane round a black promontory of rock, or in others more peaceful, but marked by her complete emancipation from her present surroundings and, needles to say, her surprising ability in her new vocation. ~ Virginia Woolf

Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness! Heavens, how I should have respected myself, then. I should have respected myself because I should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could have believed myself. Question: What is he? Answer: A sluggard; how very pleasant it would have been to hear that of oneself! It would mean that I was positively defined, it would mean that there was something to say about me. 'Sluggard' - why, it is a calling and vocation, it is a career. Do not jest, it is so. I should then be a member of the best club by right, and should find my occupation in continually respecting myself. I knew a gentleman who prided himself all his life on being a connoisseur of Lafitte. He considered this as his positive virtue, and never doubted himself. He died, not simply with a tranquil, but with a triumphant conscience, and he was quite right, too. Then I should have chosen a career for myself, I should have been a sluggard and a gluteton, not a simple one, but, for instance, one with sympathies for everything sublime and beautiful. How do you like that? I have long had visions of it. That 'sublime and beautiful' weighs heavily on my mind at forty But that is at forty; then - oh, then it would have been different! I should have found for myself a form of activity in keeping with it, to be precise, drinking to the health of everything 'sublime and beautiful.' I should have s ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The God-given vocation of theology is to be a servant of the Truth, never his self-appointed master. ~ John Clark

When something is a vocation, you don't really make a decision about it. ~ Cate Blanchett

Cordelia: I hope I've got a vocation.
Charles: I don't know what that means.
Cordelia: It means you can be a nun. If you haven't a vocation it's no good however much you want to be; and if you have a vocation, you can't get away from it, however much you hate it. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Research is not a systematic occupation but an intuitive artistic vocation. ~ Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

God, Himself, wrote the 10 into stone with his own finger. He told the epic of mankind, our origins and our future, in a book. For me, there is no more noble a cause and no more honorable a vocation than to say, like Him, I am a writer. ~ Gerard De Marigny

We are not called upon to do all the good that is possible, but only that which we can do. ~ Theodore Guerin

If even this stranger had smiled and been good-humoured to me when I addressed him; if he had put off my offer of assistance gaily and with thanks, I should have gone on my way and not felt any vocation to renew inquiries: but the frown, the roughness of the traveller, set me at my ease ~ Charlotte Bronte

Our task is to implement Jesus' unique achievement. We are like the musicians called to play and sing the unique and once-only-written musical score. We don't have to write it again, but we have to play it. Or, in the image Paul uses in I Corinthians 3, we are now in the position of young architects discovering a wonderful foundation already laid by a master architect and having to work out what sort of building was intended. ~ N. T. Wright

He saw the pleasure you took from your job every day of his life, and THAT was what he wanted. ~ David Halberstam

The best definition I have ever heard of a vocation is that it's the place where your great joy meets the world's great need. We need all of you to find your vocation. To develop your joys, your passions, and to match them to the world's great needs. ~ Eric Greitens

It terrifies you. That you missed out on something. That you gave up something you didn't know you wanted." A sharp, pitying smile pinched the corners of her lips. "What was it? Was it a boy? Was it a vocation? Or was it a whole life? ~ Celeste Ng

If each one does their duty as an individual and if each one works in their own proper vocation, it will be right with the whole. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A vocation is not something you slap on, like a coat of paint, and change whenever you want. A vocation is built into you. You have no choice. If you try to do something else, you fail. ~ Cinda Williams Chima

Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will 'turn the necessity to glorious gain. ~ C.S. Lewis

This vocation of yours.
She knew that a hunger dwelled in her, in that place where happier emotions should reside, a hunger she could neither sate nor deny. While her compulsion to scratch that itch never faded, she knew that she performed a service to the world in these coll west London rooms. While it was work for which she would receive not a single word of thanks, its value, Etienne believed, could not be denied. ~ Stephen Lloyd Jones

What one does to kill time is one's true calling. ~ Marty Rubin

I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift. ~ Mavis Gallant

One good deed is more worth than a thousand brilliant theories. Let us not wait for large opportunities, or for a different kind of work, but do just the things we "find to do" day by day. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant work you do in order to make money, with the sole purpose of making money. There are plenty of jobs because there is still a certain amount of dirty work that nobody wants to do, and that therefore they will pay someone to do it. There is essentially less and less of that kind of work because of mechanisation. If you do a job with the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd, because if money becomes the goal–and it does if you work that way–you begin increasingly to confuse it with happiness or with pleasure. Yes, one can take a handful of crisp one dollar bills and practically water your mouth over it, but this is a kind of person who is confused like a Pavlov dog, who salivates on the wrong bell. ~ Alan W. Watts

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 ~ George F. Will

We do not create happiness without integrating our passion into our work life. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Do not despise the small but significant symbolic act. God probably does not want you to reorganize the entire discipline or the entire world of your vocation overnight. Learn to be symbol-makers and story-tellers for the kingdom of God. ~ N. T. Wright

Whatever your vocation is, you are destined to reign in life because Jesus is Lord of your life. When you reign in life, you reign over sin, you reign over the powers of darkness, and you reign over depression, over poverty, over every curse, and over every sickness and disease. You REIGN over the devil and all his devices! ~ Joseph Prince

The Reformation may have resulted in a "Protestant work ethic," but this was not due to the pressure to prove one's election by worldly success, as certain social scientists ludicrously maintain. Rather, the work ethic emerged out of an understanding of the meaning of work and the satisfaction and fulfillment that come from ordinary human labor when seen through the light of the doctrine of vocation. ~ Gene Edward Veith Jr.

The training of children is such a serous thing, and it means so much to them to be surrounded from the very beginning with good influences, that I should have thought the holier a man`s vocation and the purer his life, the more fit he is to be a father ~ Ethel Lilian Voynich

Love is not our only emotional need. Psychologists have observed that among our basic needs are the need for security, self-worth, and significance. Love, however, interfaces with all of those. If I feel loved by my spouse, I can relax, knowing that my lover will do me no ill. I feel secure in her presence. I may face many uncertainties in my vocation. I may have enemies in other areas of my life, but with my spouse I feel secure. ~ Gary Chapman

I have at last found my vocation; it is love! ~ Therese De Lisieux

In spite of everything, there is still no more wonderful vocation than to continue to tolerate events and to work on in the name of our mission, in the name of that spirit which lives on in our teaching and in our vision of humanity and art, the spirit which can lead us Jews down the true and just path. But along the way, peoples will spill our blood, and that of others. ~ Marc Chagall

The time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us today ...
... some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Every occupation has its own honor before God. Ordinary work is a divine vocation or calling. In our daily work no matter how important or mundane we serve God by serving the neighbor and we also participate in God's on-going providence for the human race. ~ Martin Luther

The percentage of people qualifying for federal disability benefits because they are unable to work rose from 0.7 percent of the size of the labor force in 1960 to 5.3% in 2010. ~ Charles Murray

The only Christian work is good work well done. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

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. ~ John Dewey

Psychotherapy is a demanding vocation, and the successful therapist must be able to tolerate the isolation, anxiety, and frustration that are inevitable in the work. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decision, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise.

What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favour of the extra-ordinary? It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from it's well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as God, despite its being, as the ordinary man would say, only a personal feeling. But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape. The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing to one who has a vocation. He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called….

The original meaning of "to have a vocation" is "to be addressed by a voice." The clearest examples of this are to be found in the avowals of the Old Testament prophets. That it is not just a quaint old-fashioned way of speaking is proved by the confessions of historical personalities such as Goethe and Napolean, to mention only two familiar examples, who made no secret of their feeling of vocation. ~ C.G. Jung

I have faith that if we caught hold of God's living candle on that truth and went out into the world-I don't care [what vocation] -just out in the world being true to the vision, we would not need to defend the cause of Jesus Christ. People would come and ask; "Where have you found the radiance that I sense in your eyes and in your face? How come you don't get carried away with the world?" And we would answer that the work of salvation is the glorious work of Jesus Christ. But it is also the glorious work of the uncovering and recovering of your own latent divinity. ~ Truman G. Madsen

By practicing this little virtue, we counteract the deception that our lives should be more meritorious. It also frees us from the false imaginings of a better life elsewhere than in the state in life that is ours, as in the popular proverb that mistakenly suggests that the grass is greener on the other side. The saint says, instead, that "there is no vocation that does not have its trouble, its bitterness, and its distaste." Nevertheless, "[a] person who no longer has the restlessness of his own will is content with everything: provided that God be served, it does not matter in what manner God employs him; provided that he does his divine will, it is all the same to him ~ Fr. Thomas Dailey

Dare to change the world
There is nothing quixotic or romantic in wanting to change the world. It is possible. It is the age-old vocation of all humanity. I can't think of a better life than one dedicated to passion, to dreams, to the stubborness that defies chaos and disillusionment. ~ Gioconda Belli

We have only to see how that which makes up the reality of our lives relates to our vocation; we have only to hear the call God makes to us to work with him. Quite often it is not a matter of doing something different, but doing it differently. ~ Jean Danielou

Over the years, my work became both my vocation and avocation. Since I enjoyed it so much, I never felt a great need to go outside for relaxation. Nevertheless, I became an avid photographer and traveler. Possibly my love for travel stems from the early years when my family seldom went away on vacation. ~ Gertrude B. Elion

My intention to lecture is as vague as my intention is to go on the stage. I will never consider an offer to lecture, not because I despise the vocation, but because I have no desire to appear on the public rostrum. ~ Mary MacLane

My ultimate vocation in life is to be an irritant. ~ Elvis Costello

I believe the road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master IN THAT LINE. I have no faith in the policy of scattering one's resources. Andrew Carnegie ~ H.W. Brands

To cleave wood is a common every-day business, and yet it has its dangers; so then, reader, there are dangers connected with your calling and daily life which it will be well for you to be aware of. Your occupation may be as humble as log splitting, and yet the devil can tempt you in it. Nowhere is he safe who thinks himself so. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

True art and true science possess two unmistakable marks: the first, an inward mark, which is this, that the servitor of art and science will fulfil his vocation, not for profit but with self- sacrifice; and the second, an external sign, his productions will be intelligible to all the people whose welfare he has in view. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The old and honorable idea of 'vocation' is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted. ~ Wendell Berry

The horizons of man are incomparably narrower than that of the land on which he toils. Editor of the Nebraska journal ~ H.W. Brands

Surely people can now see that it is no accident that he, Obama, sat at the feet of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, that he is mother was a leftist activist and cultural Marxist, that his main early mentor was radical Frank Marshall Davis, that he was a member of the far-left New Party in Chicago, that his main vocation in life has been street organizing and agitation and that he didn't think the revolutionarily, transformative Warren court was liberal enough. ~ David Limbaugh

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

Some of you may be struggling with discovering your vocation and feeling a little frustrated that your intuition is not helping you more. Alas, intuition can also stand in your way because it makes you aware of too many inner voices speaking for too many different possibilities. ~ Elaine N. Aron

How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII ~ Barbara W. Tuchman