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Vocation Quotes

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Vocation Quotes

“And if we ourselves have a vocation, if we have not betrayed it, if over the years we have continued to love it, to serve it passionately, we are able to keep all sense of ownership out of our love for our children. But if on the other hand we do not have a vocation, or if we have abandoned it or betrayed it out of cynicism or a fear of life, or because of mistaken parental love, or because of some little virtue that exists within us, then we cling to our children as a shipwrecked mariner clings to a tree trunk.”

ChildrenPassionParentingVocationLife PurposeRaising Children
Book:The Little Virtues
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“Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's 'makdom and her fairnesse', never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of 'makdom and fairnesse' which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires? In the story of this passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours.”

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Book:Middlemarch
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“We grow in holiness in the honing of our specific vocation. We can't be holy in the abstract. Instead we become a holy blacksmith or a holy mother or a holy physician or a holy systems analyst. We seek God in and through our particular vocation and place in life. Each kind of work is therefore its own kind of craft that must be developed over time, both for our own sanctification and for the good of the community. As we seek to do our work well and hone our craft, we are developed and honed in our work. Our task is not to somehow inject God into our work but to join God in the work he is already doing in and through our vocational lives. Therefore, holiness itself is something like a craft—not an abstract state to which we ascend but an earthy wisdom and love that is part and parcel of how we spend our day.”

JobsWorkHolinessGood WorkVocationSanctificationCraftsmanshipPractical Theology
Book:Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life
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“Every work is great when it is in exact measure. A work that exceeds its proper limits is the least of all. We have said repeatedly that your work, your proper work, is unique; another man's work is equally so, do not interchange with him. You alone can do well what is laid upon you; you would do badly what your neighbor will do well. God is satisfied in all.”

HumanityWorkCreativityLimitsSatisfactionUniquenessVocationLimitations
Book:The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods
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“job (noun): the work that we do to secure the means of survival and – in some cases – a spring of satisfaction and delight; more often, a useful tool that we have in our possession in order to distract ourselves from potential alarming thoughts and to release us from the boredom of inactivity. Furthermore, a source that finances our leisure time so that this can effectively continue the important task of distraction.”

WorkSatisfactionProfessionBoredomOccupationJobDistractionVocationLeisure TimeInactivity
Author:Giannis Delimitsos
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“And the strange thing was he had never loved her more than in that moment, because at that moment she had become himself. But thats not love, he thought, thats not what she wants, not what any of them want, they do not want you to find yourself in them, they want instead that you should lose yourself in them. And yet, he thought, they are always trying to find themselves in you. [...] And it seemed to him then that every human was always looking for himself, in bars, in railway trains, in offices, in mirrors, in love, especially in love, for the self of him that is there, someplace, in every other human. Love was not to give oneself, but find oneself, describe oneself. And that the whole conception had been written wrong. Because the only part of any man that he can ever touch or understand is that part of himself he recognises in him. And that he is always looking for the way in which he can expose his sealed bee cell and reach the other airtight cells with which he is connected in the waxy comb. And the only way he had ever found, the only code, the only language by which he could speak and be heard by other men, could communicate himself, was with a bugle. If you had a bugle here, he told himself, you could speak to her and be understood, you could play Fatigue Call for her, with its tiredness, its heavy belly going out to sweep somebody else's streets when it would rather stay home and sleep, she would understand it then. But you havent got a bugle, himself said, not here nor any other place. Your tongue has been ripped out. All you got is two bottles, one nearly full, one nearly empty.”

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Book:From Here to Eternity
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“There is something in the depths of our being that hungers for wholeness and finality. Because we are made for eternal life, we are made for an act that gathers up all the powers and capacities of our being and offers them simultaneously and forever to God. The blind spiritual instinct that tells us obscurely that our owns lives have a particular importance and purpose, and which urges us to find out our vocation, seeks in so doing to bring us to a decision that will dedicate our lives irrevocably to their true purpose. The man who loses this sense of his own personal destiny, and who renounces all hope of having any kind of vocation in life has either lost all hope of happiness or else has entered upon some mysterious vocation that God alone can understand.”

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Book:No Man Is an Island
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“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.”

VirtueHuman NatureServiceVocationLimitationsHuman Self
Book:Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
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“Work was intended not to give a man a reason to live, but rather to give him a means to live.”

LifeReasonPurposeHumanityPeaceWorkMoneyBusinessAttitudeResponsibilityDesignFoodHard WorkAmbitionLivingEthicsResourcesLaborSlaveryBillsBusyLifestyleVanityMaking MoneyEnjoymentPeace Of MindJobVacationLazinessWork EthicCareerRelaxationVocationIdlenessWorkingHustleIntentMeansHustlerSlothfulnessMoney MakingMake A LivingEnjoyment Of LifeHard Labor
Book:Healology
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“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.”

StressHelping OthersGenerositySensitivityVocationHighly Sensitive PersonHspBurning OutOverarousal
Book:The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You
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“It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus— that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying with our entire curved and silenced selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that are being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?”

LoveFamilyChildhoodBirthMotherhoodPregnancyVocation
Book:On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
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“As nature has uncovered from under this hard shell the seed for which she most tenderly cares - the propensity and vocation to free thinking - this gradually works back upon the character of the people, who thereby gradually become capable of managing freedom; finally, it affects the principles of government, which finds it to its advantage to treat men, who are now more than machines, in accordance with their dignity.”

CharacterGovernmentNatureFreedomPrinciplesAdvantageDignityMachinesVocationPropensityFreethoughtFree Thinking
Book:An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?
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“In any love-story there are usually two stages or phases. There is the initial stage, where love is expressed by the giving of gifts, especially the gift of self. Then there comes a time when it is no longer enough to give gifts to the beloved, but one has to be ready to suffer for her or for him. Only then can it be seen whether the love is real. In the story of a vocation to consecrated virginity there are also usually two stages. There is the initial stage of the vocation, when, spurred on by grace and attracted by the ideal, one joyfully and enthusiastically says, "Yes, Lord, here I am!" Then comes the time of solitude of heart, of weariness, of crisis, when, in order to maintain that "Yes," one has to die”

SolitudeCrisisVocation
Book:Virginity: A Positive Approach to Celibacy for the Sake of the Kingdom of Heaven
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“What wisdom and what virtue there is in judging oneself truly and in remaining oneself! You have a part that only you can play; and your business is to play it to perfection, instead of trying to force fortune. Our lives are not interchangeable. Equally by aiming too high and by falling too low, one misses the path to the goal. Go straight ahead, in your own way, with God for guide.”

StudyHumilityVocationPrudenceTemperanceLimitationsStudiousness
Book:The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods
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