Vocation Quotes

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 realize it in the concrete context of the here and now.We will never find our vocations by trying to figure out whether we are better or worse than others. We are good enough to do what we are called to do. Be yourself!

Isaac Botkin

We are on location, this is not a vacation.

Deyth Banger

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.

Parker J. Palmer

I dropped my gardening tools, threw my bicycle over a hedge and went in search of fortunes laid beneath the hangman’s noose.

Fennel Hudson

Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The artist has a duty to be calm. He has no right to show his emotion, his involvement, to go pouring it all out at the audience. Any excitement over a subject must be sublimated into an Olympian calm of form. That is the only way in which an artist can tell of the things that excite him.

Andrei Tarkovsky

I finally decided what I want to be when I grow up - late.

Brian Spellman

In short, you do not have to take the job that will create excessive stress and overarousal. Someone else will take it and flourish in it. You do not have to work long hours. Indeed, it may be your duty to work shorter ones. It may not be best to advertise it, but keeping yourself healthy and in your right range of arousal is the first condition for helping others.

Elaine N. Aron

It’s natural that self-discovery is a lifelong, ever-shifting process, and that what you are drawn to will likely change at various points in your life.

Dave Shepp

You can't have a vocation of No

Eve Tushnet

God allows man to learn His supernatural ends, but the decision to strive towards an end, the choice of course, is left to man's free will. God does not redeem man against his will.

John Paul II

It is in the stormiest skies that eagles find their true calling.

Matshona Dhliwayo

I bent my head and breathed the fresh new scent of her. I looked into her deep blue eyes and saw reflected there the dawn of my own new life. This little girl seemed to me, at that moment, answer enough to all my questions. To have saved this small, singular one—this alone seemed reason enough that I lived. I knew then that this was how I was meant to go on: away from death and toward life, from birth to birth, from seed to blossom, living my life amongst wonders.

Geraldine Brooks

I don't care much whether I ever get to know anything - but I want to work out something in figures - something that hasn't got to do with human beings. I don't want people particularly. In some ways, Henry, I'm a humbug - I mean, I'm not what you all take me for. I'm not domestic, or very practical or sensible, really.And if I could calculate things, and use a telescope, and have to work out figures, and know to a fraction where I was wrong, I should be perfectly happy, and I believe I should give William all he wants.

Virginia Woolf

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.

Meia Geddes

In the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree. Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons.

Max Weber

The divine mandate to use the world justly and charitably, then, defines every person's moral predicament as that of a steward. But this predicament is hopeless and meaningless unless it produces an appropriate discipline: stewardship. And stewardship is hopeless and meaningless unless it involves long-term courage, perseverance, devotion, and skill. This skill is not to be confused with any accomplishment or grace of spirit or of intellect. It has to do with everyday proprieties in the practical use and care of the created things - with "right livelihood.

Wendell Berry

Knowledge (curriculum) and behavior (pedagogy) are embedded in everyone’s core beliefs about the nature of God, humanity, and the world.

Abraham Kuyper

I want to make a difference. But get a job? I worry that will make the ordinary, like everybody else.

Claire Messud

It's not just a question of doing what you love for a living. It's about doing what you love with love. Then your life and all be transformed.

Rasheed Ogunlaru

, “As for a limit to one’s labors, I, for one, do not recognize any for a high-minded man, except that the labors themselves should lead to noble accomplishments.

Alexander the Great

Those were times when brave men who knew and loved their profession couldn't be overlooked.

Thomas Hughes

The author describes Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn as "seldom at ease without a gavel in his hand.

Robert A. Caro

Many of us wake up at the age of 40 one day, dreading going to work because we were forced to pick a career before we could legally buy a beer.

Dave Shepp

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

Western farmers were individualists cheifly in their dreams.

H.W. Brands

Sam Rayburn on LBJ's recuperation from his heart attack: "It would kill him if he relaxed.

Robert A. Caro

Think little of yourselves, but do not think too little of your calling.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Idolatry means turning a good thing into the ultimate thing.

Timothy J. Keller

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

Theodore Guerin

Human" is a kind of midway creature, reflecting God into the world, and reflecting the world back to God.

N.T. Wright

On God's calendar, there are no ordinary days.

David McGee

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

Rebecca Solnit

In any love-story there are usually two stages or phases. There is the initial stage, where love is expressed by the giving of gifts, especially the gift of self. Then there comes a time when it is no longer enough to give gifts to the beloved, but one has to be ready to suffer for her or for him. Only then can it be seen whether the love is real. In the story of a vocation to consecrated virginity there are also usually two stages. There is the initial stage of the vocation, when, spurred on by grace and attracted by the ideal, one joyfully and enthusiastically says, "Yes, Lord, here I am!" Then comes the time of solitude of heart, of weariness, of crisis, when, in order to maintain that "Yes," one has to die

Raniero Cantalamessa

This is a fundamental irony of most people’s lives. They don’t quite know what they want to do with their lives. Yet they are very active.

Ryan Holiday

In olden times there were warriors, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants. Agriculture was said to be closer to the source of things than trade or manufacturing, and the farmer was said to be "the cupbearer of the gods." He was always able to get by somehow or other and have enough to eat.

Masanobu Fukuoka

earn what you can since everything's for sale

Geoffrey Chaucer

If your vocation be shoeing horses, or painting pictures, and you can do one or the other better than your fellows, then you are a fool if you are not proud of your ability. And so I am very proud that upon two planets no greater fighter has ever lived than John Carter, Prince of Helium.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

If I sometimes seem to take too great pride in my fighting ability, it must be remembered that fighting is my vocation.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Do what you are doing. Monastic motto

Rick Perlstein

I work pretty hard for a sufficient living, and therefore – yes, I do well.

Charles Dickens

Looking to advance in journalism, one future editor displayed skilled as varied as economic analysis and humorous commentary.

Harold Holzer

It's hard luck always having to be a judge.

Antoine De Saint Exupery

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

We want big results-sooner rather than later. And we've forgotten that God showers his extraordinary gifts through ordinary means of grace, loves us through ordinary fellow image bearers, and sends us into the world to love and serve others in ordinary callings. Michael Horton, Ordinary, 14

Michael S. Horton

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

Did you notice there aren’t any average kids anymore—only Gifted and Disposable?

Heather Choate Davis

It does not strike me as a good thing that the only person we can be so, so close to is the person we're dating.

Chris Damian

The doctrine of vocation deals with how God works through human beings to bestow His gifts. God gives us this day our daily bread by means of the farmer the banker, the cooks, And the lady at the check-out counter. He creates new life – the most amazing miracle of all – by means of mothers and fathers. He protects us by means of the police officers, firemen, and our military. He creates. Through artists. He heals by working through doctors, nurses, and others whom He has gifted, equipped, and called to the medical professions.

Gene Edward Veith Jr.

the struggle is not with others, but within us, to do what we are called to do

John Geddes

Don't be in a hurry about finding your work in the world for yourself—you are not old enough to judge for yourself yet; but just look about you in the place you find yourself in, and try to make things a little better and honester there.

Thomas Hughes

She handled it (her trade) with all the grace that belongs to mastery.

George Eliot

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.

Gilbert Meilaender

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

JOHN C MAXWELL

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

Dorothy L. Sayers

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.

Timothy J. Keller

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.

Timothy J. Keller

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Vocation Quotes

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