Vocation Quotes

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

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

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

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

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

~ Claire Messud

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

~ Abraham Kuyper

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

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 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

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

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

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

Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not have talent, one can be called and not know how to go.

~ Benjamin Moser

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

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

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

~ Brian Spellman

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

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

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

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

We are on location, this is not a vacation.

~ Deyth Banger

Films are not primarily an entertainment medium. They are weapons. If you understand that, then you are ready to pursue filmmaking as a vocation.

~ Isaac Botkin

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

~ Timothy J. Keller

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!

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious.

~ Jean Rostand

Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.

~ Edward Hirsch