Quotes About Vocation

To get a doctorate, you need only have a modicum of intelligence and the ability to grind it out. I'm afraid you may only be qualified to be an academic, not a pastor. Ministry is a lot harder than scholarship.

One time, Grandpa had gifts for us. He gave me a hand-polished, dark steel pair of pliers that fit my fist perfectly. For my brother, he had some coins from Canada. Even then, I knew these gifts were wise. I tried to fix things with my hands. For my brother, vocation was more distant: repair of the world.

This is the splendid and memorable wisdom of legendary sage Howard Thurman, who once advised someone seeking vocational guidance, "Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive" (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, [New York: Crossroad, xv]). Yielding to your sacred inner flame is your best offering to the world.

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That is the great and liberating thing about any genuine personality: he voluntarily sacrifices himself to his vocation, and consciously translates into his own individual reality what would only lead to ruin if it were lived unconsciously by the group

Who has vocation hears the voice of the inner man; he is called. And so it is the legendary belief that he possesses a private demon who counsels him and whose mandates he must execute.

But it happens as often in following as in losing a vocation. Perhaps we were called to found, to organise, or to lead some little movement or society or a group in an existing society, or to take charge of a hospital or club or post—any such thing. We started with the one idea of serving God, but gradually the formalities, the necessary social life, the business side, has overcome us. From being an apostle we have become an organiser; from being an organiser, a business man or woman.

May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us in all our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.

His Theory of the Universe seems to have been, that it consisted solely of a multitude of objects which could be weighed, numbered, and measured; and the vocation to which he considered himself called was, to weigh, number and measure as many of those objects as his allotted three-score years and ten would permit. This conviction biased all his doings, alike his great scientific enterprises, and the petty details of his daily life.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.

The Christian ministry is the worst of all trades, but the best of all professions.

I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.

Are you doing the kind of work you were built for, so that you can expect to be able to do very large amounts of that kind and thrive under it? Or are you doing a kind of which you can do comparatively little?

The high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness.

The road to happiness lies in two simple principles: find what interests you and that you can do well, and put your whole soul into it-every bit of energy and ambition and natural ability you have.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he to be at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.

The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.

Never desert your own line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed.

One should stick to the sort of thing for which one was made; I tried to be an herbalist, whereas I should keep to the butcher's trade.

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

No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him; there is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will; And blessed are the horny hands of toil!

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

Teaching was never a vocation for me. Certainly I never aspired to teach people how to live. I was what used to be called a scholar. I wrote books about dead people. That was where my heart was. I taught only to make a living.