Vocation Quotes

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The president notices that when he takes off his coat to dig, people take more notice of the visual than they did his preceding remarks.

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

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.

Do what you are doing. Monastic motto

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.

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.

The horizon changes but the sun does not.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

When he studied, it was not so much for a promotion as to EXCEL at his job.

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

You can't have a vocation of No

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.

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 dream apprentices to expand the reach of her dreams and she wrote dreams for herself in which she would sit at a desk, pen in hand, and write even more dreams. This nearly doubled her output.

The voice of Jacob will do a little good if the hands be the hands of Essau.

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.

, “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.

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

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

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.

Only God can make the common sacred.

Public servants in this Europe often do their best when they stop caring about whether they'll be fired.

Celebration comes when the common features of life are redeemed.

All professions have some element of theater to them.

Even his own speeches bored him.

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

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.

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

As is the case with many adolescents, Lewis's increased command over over the things of the world brought with it a corresponding atrophy of the moral sense.

Hughes might discuss Calvinism ably, but he did not live it, he was—by Time corporate standards—just a little lazy.

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

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...

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

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 influence of untold numbers of followers of Christ living out their callings faithfully across the vastness and complexity of modern society.

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

People need self-respect, that self respect must be earned – it cannot be self-respect if it's not earned – and the only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing.

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.

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), but if your work does not benefit others, the chances are you have missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work does benefit others, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you are unhappy with it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren’t helping your customers much either.Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s hunger meet.

Idolatry means turning a good thing into the ultimate thing.

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.

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

Passion does not translate easily into good income.

I choose me bristles with prideYes, I doA broom for the shaftAnd a broom for the flumeThough I'm covered with soot From me 'ead to me toesA sweep knows 'e's welcomeWherever 'e goes