Vocation Quotes

The wall sawyer did not ask the little queen what she did. This was because in the little queen’s kingdom, people only volunteered their doings if they wanted to, and they never asked others their doings. It was considered impolite. Asking what one did was like asking who they were, and that was too simple a question for a very complex answer.

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.

Walter M. Miller Jr

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

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 purpose, that is because we have sinned and deviated from God's path.

Old fighters keep making comebacks. We are more alive when boxing than at almost any other time.

Only God can make the common sacred.

Passion does not translate easily into good income.

Work was intended not to give a man a reason to live, but rather to give him a means to live.

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

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

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 youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman's glance.

The horizon changes but the sun does not.

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.