Vocation Quotes

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.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Your calling is to be faithful to God where you are, and in doing this all work is sacred, spiritual, and worthy of your full attention and energy. When you get to work, you are not entering a secular environment as much as you are bringing the sacred into the world by following Christ wherever you are.

~ Joe Thorn

Speaking of Newton but also commenting more broadly on education and the Enlightenment: I have seen a professor of mathematics only because he was great in his vocation, buried like a king who had done well by his subjects.

~ Voltaire

Vocation at its deepest level is, 'This is something I can't not do, for reasons I'm unable to explain to anyone else and don't fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling.

~ Parker J. Palmer

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

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.

~ Os Guinness

Ah, God, it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling hadone all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years aBarrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty aSoldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and fifty a Judge! AllRoads are fine Roads, beloved Sister, none more thananother, so that with one Life to spend I am a Manbare-bumm'd at Taylors with Cash for but one pair ofBreeches, or a Scholar at Brookstalls with Money for asingle Book: to choose ten were no Trouble; to choose one,impossible! All Trades, all Crafts, all Professions arewondrous, but none is finer than the rest together. Icannot choose, sweet Anna: twixt Stools my Breech fallethto the Ground!

~ John Barth

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

Love is the only answer to every question. It is the only thing that will serve you in every situation. It is the route and the destination. It is medication, liberation and should be at the heart of and expression of your vocation.

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

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

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

~ Heather Choate Davis

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

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

When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves

~ Richard Rohr

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

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

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

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

~ Harold Holzer

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

~ Charles Dickens

Do what you are doing. Monastic motto

~ Rick Perlstein

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

earn what you can since everything's for sale

~ Geoffrey Chaucer

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

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

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

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

~ David Mcgee

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

~ N.t. Wright

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

~ Theodore Guerin

Idolatry means turning a good thing into the ultimate thing.

~ Timothy J. Keller

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