Quotes About Vocation

What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been! How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity—the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation.

From the beginning, our lives lay down clues to selfhood and vocation, though the clues may be hard to decode. But trying to interpret them is profoundly worthwhile—especially when we are in our twenties or thirties or forties, feeling profoundly lost, having wandered, or been dragged, far away from our birthright gifts.

Every profession that attracts people for reasons of the heart is a profession in which people, and the work they do, suffer from losing heart.

Our deepest calling is to grow into our authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks—we will also find our path of authentic service in the world. True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as "the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need.

Vocation at its deepest level is not, "Oh, boy, do I want to go to this strange place where I have to learn a new way to live and where no one, including me, understands what I'm doing." 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.

Perhaps there is a lesson here about the complexity, even duplicity, we must embrace on the road to vocation, where we sometimes find ourselves needing to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

Here, I think, is another clue to finding true self and vocation: we must withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situation—projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves—and acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits.

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.

If I am an artist, I have a vocation. As one drawn to a lover or called to a religious mission, I go to my work—my writing—because it is essential to my happiness.

Francis Schaeffer wrote, "A ministry such as teaching the Bible in a college is no higher calling intrinsically than being a businessman or doing something else.

I didn't mind the misery of a vocation but I dreaded not being called

Sentivo di essermi trasformata, toccata dalla rivelazione che l'arte è creata dagli esseri umani, che essere un artista voleva dire vedere ciò che gli altri non potevano vedere. Non avevo prove di possedere la stoffa dell'artista, ma bramavo esserlo con tutta me stessa [...] Mi domandai se meritavo davvero di essere un'artista; non mi preoccupavo delle sofferenze che una vocazione avrebbe comportato, m avevo il terrore di non ricevere la chiamata.

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I have treated many artists. There are among them many neurotics, so many that one finally comes to believe that one cannot be an artist without being neurotic. Again I found in them that inner conflict which is characteristic of modern man: the conflict between a right intuition (namely, that their vocation has fundamental importance for the destiny of humanity) and a false idea (namely, that art is superfluous luxury).

Our work is a vocation to which we have been called from the beginning of time. When we work we are partaking in and joining with God's ongoing creation of the world.

Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. Harold Whitman

It's more important to know whom you are called to be with than what you are called to do.

At the end of four years' time, at graduation, we were down to 12. At our reunion that we had several years ago, only 1 out of the 52 actually made it to ordination and priesthood. So there you go, there's your numbers.

I went whole hog at the actor's lifestyle - really embraced it. I had by then known how much I loved acting already, because I discovered acting from a teacher in the seminary - that's the first place I ever did it, in the seminary.

Then Manoah asked, “When your words come to pass, what will be the boyís rule of life and mission?”

When he turned around and saw me, he called out and I answered, ëHere I am!í

The one who quarries stones may be injured by them, and he who splits logs endangers himself.

“I was not a prophet,” Amos replied, “nor was I the son of a prophet; rather, I was a herdsman and a tender of sycamore-fig trees.

About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing.