Vocation Quotes - Page 3

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

...we find our vocations not by focusing on ourselves, but by focusing on others.

A husband's work as provider will be so difficult that it can only be fulfilled in the power of the Spirit and a transformed life.

Lincoln bore down or anything he handled, mastering both the details and the principles.

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

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.

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

We must wake up. If we are going to find our callings, we must live intentionally and audaciously. And we must be generous. This choice is not an easy one, and it doesn't come naturally, but it's how we were meant to live. It's the only way - I'm quite convinced of this - that we can find the satisfaction we've been searching for, the lives we've been dreaming of. And although there are legitimate health, business, and psychological benefits to generous living, the most important one is this: generosity gives your life meaning.

Western farmers were individualists cheifly in their dreams.

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

The only Christian work is good work well done.

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.

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

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.

Toughened or coarsened by their worldly lives, the other dissenters could shrug and move on, but Souter couldn't. His whole life was being a judge.

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.

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

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

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

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!

If you find what you do each day seems to have no link to any higher purpose, you probably want to rethink what you're doing.

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

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

The rhythms of the game complemented the lifestyle he preferred.

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.

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.

You couldn't allow yourself to get bored. THAT would be a fight.

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.

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.

Duty was not untinged by ambition.

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.

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

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 circumstances. When this happens, the oft-disappointed world will notice and investigate.11/02/2010 blog

I thought buying at the local market would be an excellent way to build positive relationships with the local villagers.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

He was one of the fortunate few for whom there simply was no discernible line between work and play, between creation and recreation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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