Vocation Calling Quotes & Sayings

Oh, if only I did nothing simply as a result of laziness. Lord, how I'd respect myself then. I'd respect myself precisely because at least I'd be capable of being lazy; at least I'd possess one more or less positive trait of which I could be certain. Question: who am I? Answer: a sluggard. Why, it would have been very pleasant to hear that said about oneself. It would mean that I'd been positively identified; it would mean that there was something to be said about me. "A sluggard!" Why, that's a calling and a vocation, a whole career! Don't joke, it's true. Then, by rights I'd be a member of the very best club and would occupy myself exclusively by being able to respect myself continually. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Our problem as Americans
at least, among my race and gender
is that we resist the very idea of limits, regarding limits of all sorts as temporary and regrettable impositions on our lives. — Parker J. Palmer

Nothing's work unless you'd rather be doing something else. — John C. Maxwell

Rather, the doctrine of vocation encourages attention to each individual's uniqueness, talents, and personality. These are valued as gifts of God, who creates and equips each person in a different way for the calling He has in mind for that person's life. The doctrine of vocation undermines conformity, recognizes the unique value of every person, and celebrates human differences; but it sets these individuals into a community with other individuals, avoiding the privatizing, self-centered narcissism of secular individualism. — Gene Edward Veith Jr.

It is the general rule of the moral universe that those men prosper who do their work with all their hearts, while those are almost certain to fail who go to their labour leaving half their hearts behind them. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

A true Christian lives and labors on earth not for himself but for his neighbor. Therefore the whole spirit of his life him impels him to do even that which he needs not do, but which is profitable and necessary for his neighbor. — Martin Luther

It's a gift of tranquility when your adult desires mesh with your childhood background. I don't quite know why mine didn't, although I think books, again, are partly to blame. — Maureen Corrigan

Question: What is he? Answer: A sluggard; how very pleasant it would have been to hear that of oneself! It would mean that I was positively defined, it would mean that there was something to say about me. "Sluggard" - why, it is a calling and vocation, it is a career. Do not jest, it is so. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He was one of the fortunate few for whom there simply was no discernible line between work and play, between creation and recreation. — George F. Will

The tailor put on the girdle, and resolved to go forth into the world, because he thought his workshop was too small for his valor. — Jacob Grimm

We can't understand our calling and our vocation until we listen to the Lord ... until we look upon the Lord ... until we realize who it is that we're really serving. Are we serving God? Or the world? — Mark Hart

When he studied, it was not so much for a promotion as to EXCEL at his job. — David Halberstam

A live-in domestic worker: You are never sure that your soul is your own except when you are out of the house. — H.W. Brands

Powerful Leaders intentionally pursue their vocation of who they are not a career of what they do; what's calling you? — Michael Walker

Christians ought to have a different approach to business. As believers, we should view work as both service and a form of worship. — Charles W. Colson

Lincoln bore down or anything he handled, mastering both the details and the principles. — Richard Brookhiser

Robert Kennedy was inspired to take on organized crime by watching the landmark movie On the Waterfront. — David Talbot

We should remember that with such preparatory reading, a good pace to maintain is to try and finish a book every week or two. This may seem intimidating at first, and if it were considered a hobby, it would be overwhelming. But the task is the education of your children, which is not a hobby but a vocation. The word vocation comes from the Latin verb voco, which means "I call." A person's vocation is his calling; a parent's vocation is to learn in order to teach. — Wesley Callihan

What if followers of Christ stopped looking for work in places where the MOST number of Christians Christians lived and started looking for work places where the LEAST Christians lived? — David Platt

The voice of Jacob will do a little good if the hands be the hands of Essau. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

A husband's work as provider will be so difficult that it can only be fulfilled in the power of the Spirit and a transformed life. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

He was like a man thinking on an abstract subject all the time. — H.W. Brands

I always like to be in the presence of people who are good at and love their jobs, Irrespective of their jobs. — Geoff Dyer

Yes, there are passages in Scripture - especially in Paul's epistles - about women's roles. But it is biblically untenable and soul crushing to tell a woman that the only worthwhile activity she can do is to birth children and serve a husband and a family. This mind-set also creates an idol out of the family structure, making success as a homemaker/mother the most important vocation in a woman's life. And although this is a high calling, it should not trump our first and foremost calling: to believe in Christ. — Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

Film is something that came later into my life. I had a Jesuit education, and I consider acting and the theater as kind of a calling - a vocation. — Michael Moriarty

To make a real difference . . . [there would have to be] a reappropriation of the idea of vocation or calling, a return in a new way to the idea of work as a contribution to the good of all and not merely as a means to one's own advancement.3 — Timothy Keller

The time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us today ...
... some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. — Martin Luther King Jr.

For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is constantly ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Don't be in a hurry about finding your work in the world for yourself - you are not old enough to judge for yourself yet; but just look about you in the place you find yourself in, and try to make things a little better and honester there. — Thomas Hughes

No matter what office LBJ assumed he lifted greater than when he found it. — David Pietrusza

Everybody has a vocation to some form of life-work. However, behind that call (and deeper than any call), everybody has a vocation to be a person to be fully and deeply human in Christ Jesus. — Brennan Manning

The only Christian work is good work well done. — Dorothy L. Sayers

We find our vocations not by focusing on ourselves, but by focusing on others. — Jeff Goins

The extraneous duties, in a sense, were the job. — Tom Clancy

You may feel the human realm is a difficult place, but there is surely no better world to live in. You will find another only by going to the nonhuman; and the nonhuman realm would surely be a far more difficult place to inhabit than the human.

So if this best of worlds proves a hard one for you, you must simply do your best to settle in and relax as you can, and make this short life of ours, if only briefly, an easier place in which to make your home. Herein lies the poet's true calling, the artist's vocation. We owe our humble gratitude to all practitioners of the arts, for they mellow the harshness of our human world and enrich the human heart.

Yes, a poem, a painting, can draw the sting of troubles from a troubled world and lay in its place a blessed realm before our grateful eyes. — Soseki Natsume

If we are unfaithful to true self, we will extract a price from others. We will make promises we cannot keep, build houses from flimsy stuff, conjure dreams that devolve into nightmares, and other people will suffer - if we are unfaithful to true self. — Parker J. Palmer

Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling. — Edward Hirsch

How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII — Barbara W. Tuchman

You couldn't allow yourself to get bored. THAT would be a fight. — Tom Clancy

There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Love is a career with its own stages, rewards, and failures ... a vocation as concrete as a calling in the Church, worth giving a lifetime to. — Andrew Holleran

As is the case with many adolescents, Lewis's increased command over over the things of the world brought with it a corresponding atrophy of the moral sense. — Philip Zaleski

Once I asked my counsellor for advice about my vocation. I asked, 'How can I know if God is calling me and for what he is calling me?' He answered, 'You will know by your happiness. If you are happy with the idea that God calls you to serve him and your neighbour, this will be the proof of your vocation.' — Mother Teresa

M'Lord, I know from history that once upon a time in a much earlier Church, a vocation to the priesthood meant a call from the bishop, not necessarily a call from God. And I heard the Bishop of Rome himself call you to be that which you have now become by ordination and consecration. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing. — Harold Bloom

...most writers, and most other artists, too, are primarily motivated in their desperate vocation by a desire to find and to separate truth from the complex of lies and evasions they live in, and I think that this impulse is what makes their work not so much a profession as a vocation, a true calling. — Tennessee Williams

...if I do not take my intellectual vocation seriously, putting it before everything else even at the risk of appearing inhuman, then I am also incapable of helping people in more concrete and proximate ways. Conversely, if I am not alert and ready to save people from a conflagration, that is to say, if I do not take my spiritual calling in all earnestness, sacrificing to it all else, even my own life, then I shall be unable to help in rescuing the manuscript. If I do not involve myself in the concrete issues of my time, and if I do not open my house to all the winds of the world, then anything I produce from an ivory tower will be barren and cursed. Yet if I do not shut doors and windows in order to concentrate on this work, then I will not be able to offer anything of value to my neighbors. — Raimon Panikkar

We must wake up. If we are going to find our callings, we must live intentionally and audaciously. And we must be generous. This choice is not an easy one, and it doesn't come naturally, but it's how we were meant to live. It's the only way - I'm quite convinced of this - that we can find the satisfaction we've been searching for, the lives we've been dreaming of. And although there are legitimate health, business, and psychological benefits to generous living, the most important one is this: generosity gives your life meaning. — Jeff Goins

The president notices that when he takes off his coat to dig, people take more notice of the visual than they did his preceding remarks. — Paul C. Nagel

Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice "out there" calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice "in here" calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God. — Thomas Merton

Don't mention it,' the sorcerer patted the neck of his horse, which had been scared by all the yelling from Yarpen and his dwarves. 'To me, Witcher, calling killing a vocation is loathsome, low and nonsensical. Our world is in equilibrium. The annihilation, the killing, of any creatures that inhabit this world upsets that equilibrium. And a lack of equilibrium brings closer extinction; extinction and the end of the world as we know it.' 'A druidic theory,' Geralt pronounced. 'I know it. An old hierophant expounded it to me once, back in Rivia. Two days after our conversation he was torn apart by wererats. It was impossible to prove any upset in equilibrium. — Andrzej Sapkowski

Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavours, even the best, will come to naught.
Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavour, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God's calling, can matter forever. — Timothy Keller

Public servants in this Europe often do their best when they stop caring about whether they'll be fired. — Ron Suskind

Good writers practice. They take time to write, crafting and editing a piece until it's just right. They spend hours and days just revising. Good writers take criticism on the chin and say "thank you" to helpful feedback; they listen to both the external and internal voices that drive them. And they use it all to make their writing better. They're resigned to the fact that first drafts suck and that the true mark of a champion is a commitment to the craft. It's not about writing in spurts of inspiration. It's about doing the work, day-in and day-out. Good writers push through because they believe in what they're doing. They understand this is more than a profession or hobby. It's a calling, a vocation. — Jeff Goins

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. — Annie Dillard

Pay attention to what you wish you were doing when you're doing something else. — Joyce Rachelle

She handled it (her trade) with all the grace that belongs to mastery. — George Eliot

I still don't know if I'm good enough or if it's a calling or a vocation or something, but the talent part is out. My desire to do it is undoubted. I just love doing this. — Chris Isaak

One good deed is more worth than a thousand brilliant theories. Let us not wait for large opportunities, or for a different kind of work, but do just the things we "find to do" day by day. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

We have a tendency to boil the Reformation down to two points: the authority of Scripture and justification through faith apart from works. However, the Reformers emphasized three essential components of their message, not two. The third was the doctrine of "vocation" or calling. Discipleship must transform all of life because God has a calling for you in every area of your life. The Reformation's championing of calling took the idea of cultural transformation to a new level. — Greg Forster

Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one's true business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into an uncongenial calling. — John Dewey

A young mark twain on the make: I can't turn in inkstand into Aladdin's lamp. — H.W. Brands

Calling resists privatization by insisting on the totality of faith. Calling resists politicization by demanding a tension with every human allegiance and association. Calling resists polarization by requiring an attitude toward, and action in, society that is inevitably transforming because it is constantly engaged. Grand Christian movements will rise and fall. Grand campaigns will be mounted and grand coalitions assembled. But all together such coordinated efforts will never match the influence of untold numbers of followers of Christ living out their callings faithfully across the vastness and complexity of modern society. — Os Guinness

Unless you are fulfilled, unless you have found something that is not just a profession but something like a vocation, a calling, you will never be able to feel happy about your parents, because they are the cause of you being in this miserable world. You cannot feel grateful, there is nothing to be grateful about. Once you are fulfilled, then you will feel tremendously grateful. And your fulfilment is possible only if you don't become a thing. Your destiny is to become a person. Your destiny is to become an intrinsic value. Your destiny is to become an end in yourself. — Osho

Every day is important for us because it is a day ordained by God. If we are bored with life there is something wrong with our concept of God and His involvement in our daily lives. Even the most dull and tedious days of our lives are ordained by God and ought to be used by us to glorify Him. — Jerry Bridges

Celebration comes when the common features of life are redeemed. — Richard J. Foster

The doctrine of vocation or calling gained currency as men began to take time and history seriously. If the goal of the Christian life is a neoplatonic flight from this world, then pietism has effectively undermined the doctrine of non-ecclesiastical callings. To speak of having a calling is usually to speak of the clergy and clerical office. — Rousas John Rushdoony

The voice in this case that is calling you is not necessarily coming from God, but from deep within. It emanates from your individuality. It tells you which activities suit your character. And at a certain point, it calls you to a particular form of work or career. Your work then is something connected deeply to who you are, not a separate compartment in your life. You develop then a sense of your vocation. — Robert Greene

Only God can make the common sacred. — Beth Moore

All professions have some element of theater to them. — David Halberstam

I believe the road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master IN THAT LINE. I have no faith in the policy of scattering one's resources. Andrew Carnegie — H.W. Brands

The percentage of people qualifying for federal disability benefits because they are unable to work rose from 0.7 percent of the size of the labor force in 1960 to 5.3% in 2010. — Charles Murray

Why do lazy, minimum effort employees always seem to find places where they feel "underappreciated"? — Matt Chandler

Calling is connection: Uncovering our calling is a deliberate choice to serve others and to make a difference in the world. Our calling is made manifest in service to others...it is paradoxical but true; we are more likely to receive the meaning and fulfillment we seek when we enable others to achieve the meaning and fulfillment they seek, as well. — David Shapiro

Teaching involves a search for meaning in the world. Teaching is a life project, a calling, a vocation that is an organizing center of all other activities. Teaching is past and future as well as present, it is background as well as foreground, it is depth as well as surface. Teaching is pain and humor, joy and anger, dreariness and epiphany. Teaching is world building, it is architecture and design, it is purpose and moral enterprise. Teaching is a way of being in the world that breaks through the boundaries of the traditional job and in the process redefines all life and teaching itself. (p. 130) — Nancy Fichtman Dana

He cross-examined his very wine when he had nothing else at hand. — Charles Dickens

He wasn't an especially charismatic or commanding individual, but what he lacked in personality he emphatically made up for in diligence. — Dan Jones

Hughes might discuss Calvinism ably, but he did not live it, he was - by Time corporate standards - just a little lazy. — David Halberstam

One of the great wonders of Christianity is that you were born into your times, to set your times aright. — John Eldredge

At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature! — Dorothy L. Sayers

Our vocation and professional work is not a second class activity, something we do just to put food on the table. It is the high calling for which we were originally created. The way we serve a Creator God is by being creative with the talents and gifts He has given us. — Nancy Pearcey

He must become an apprentice to ordinary life. — Paul C. Nagel

There is more to life than work, and a life without ample space for family and friends is incomplete. But this much should not be controversial: Vocation - one's calling in life - plays a large role in defining the meaning of that life. For some, the nurturing of children is the vocation. For some, an avocation or a cause can become an all-absorbing source of satisfaction, with the job a means of paying the bills and nothing more. But for many others, vocation takes the form of the work one does for a living. Working hard, seeking to get ahead, and striving to excel at one's craft are not only quintessential features of traditional American culture but also some of its best features. Industriousness is a resource for living a fulfilling human life instead of a life that is merely entertaining. — Charles Murray

A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests. Thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment and self-realization slowly crushes a person. — Timothy Keller

Duty was not untinged by ambition. — Barbara W. Tuchman

If you find what you do each day seems to have no link to any higher purpose, you probably want to rethink what you're doing. — Ronald A. Heifetz

One of the greatest disconnects for this generation is how life and work fit together. There is a need to talk about purpose in life, vocation, and calling. We need to provide a stronger theology of work to help them make integrated connections to their daily lives. — David Kinnaman

The struggle is not with others, but within us, to do what we are called to do — John Geddes

Men seldom persevere in a vocation unless they believe or can convince themselves that it is fundamentally more important than anyother calling. Women are the same with their lovers. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I feel about romance the same way I do about a vocation; it's a calling. — Alden Ehrenreich

Cause every task of your day to be a sacred ministry to the Lord. however mundane your duties, for you they are a sacrament. — Richard J. Foster

Writing is a vocation and, as in any other calling, a writer should develop his talents for the greater glory of God. Novels should be neither homilies nor apologetics: the author's faith, and the grace he has received, will become apparent in his work even if it does not have Catholic characters or a Catholic theme. — Piers Paul Read

Monastic vows rest on the false assumption that there is a special calling, a vocation, to which superior Christians are invited to observe the counsels of perfection while ordinary Christians fulfill only the commands; but there simply is no special religious vocation since the call of God comes to each at the common tasks. — Martin Luther

The rhythms of the game complemented the lifestyle he preferred. — Nicholas Dawidoff

I became an actor because it was my clumsy attempt to become myself. — Martin Sheen

Teddy Roosevelt "had relished "every hour" of every day as president. Indeed, (he was) fearing the "dull thud" he would experience upon returning to private life. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Our task is to carry the Lord's peace into every situation, into every duty. — Davis Bunn

I carry too much of the week into the Sabbath , and too little of the Sabbath into the week. John Quincy Adams — Paul C. Nagel

To cleave wood is a common every-day business, and yet it has its dangers; so then, reader, there are dangers connected with your calling and daily life which it will be well for you to be aware of. Your occupation may be as humble as log splitting, and yet the devil can tempt you in it. Nowhere is he safe who thinks himself so. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The horizons of man are incomparably narrower than that of the land on which he toils. Editor of the Nebraska journal — H.W. Brands