Quotes About Vocation

Find a job from which you do not need a vacation.

I didn't choose poetry: poetry chose me.

Whatever your life's pursuit -- art, poetry, sculpture, music, whatever your occupation may be -- you can be as spiritual as clergy, always living a life of praise.

Poets are born, not paid.

It may be said that an education which does not succeed in making poetry a resource in the business of life as well as in its leisure, has something the matter with it.

I consider poetry my vocation, not my "career." My career is as a university professor; that's what pays the bills.

Poetry is not a profession it's a destiny.

There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live.

Look for an occupation that you like, and you will not need to labor for a single day in your life.

Each person has a sacred potential for a specific purpose.

All Christians are in ministry. Sometimes, they're in church work.

Your purpose has the capacity to employ and enrich you for a lifetime.

Father, in spite of all this spending of money in learning Latin, I will be a painter.

He is to be educated because he is a man, and not because he is to make shoes, nails, and pins.

Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.

It was only one of a dozen or twenty vocations which he had taken up at various times, only to drop them again as soon as he made the discovery that they one and all entailed months and even years of hard work if he was ever to fulfil his ambitious desire of doing and being something great in the world.

Whenever it is possible, a boy should choose some occupation which he should do even if he did not need the money.

And at that pivotal moment, the University of Tennessee came calling. So did forensic anthropology. My career as "Indian grave-robber number one" was over. My true vocation—as a forensic scientist—was about to begin.

But there are two basic kinds of professional, Harkness saw in a moment of self-congratulatory illumination. There's the professionalism that does something well enough to earn a living from it. And there's the professionalism that creates a commitment so intense that the earning of a living happens by the way. Its dynamic isn't wages but the determination to do something as well as it can be done.

God sometimes calls people to a cause not born of their own abilities or most superficial desires. But his call is always absolutely congruent with our destiny, our truest self, our identity and the shape of our being.

Our calling is therefore the way of being that is both best for us and best for the world. This is what Frederick Buechner means when he states that "the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

Our vocation is a call to serve God and our fellow humans in the distinctive way that fits the shape of our being. In one way or another, Christian calling will always involve the care of God's creation and people. This realigns us to the created world and to our neighbor, moving us from self-centered exploitation to self-sacrificing service and stewardship.

Jesus' understanding of his vocation came out of wrestling with God, himself and the devil in the solitude of the wilderness.8 Resisting the temptations to a false self based on power, prestige or possessions, Jesus chose his true identity as the deeply loved Son of God.

God's will for us is that we live out the harmonious expression of our gifts, temperament, passions and vocation in truthful dependence on God.