Quotes About Vocation And Calling

#1. 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

#2. We may be closest to hearing the call when we feel most alone or in trouble, for genius hides behind the wound and one of the greatest wounds in life is to not know who we are intended to be or what we are supposed to serve in life.

Michael Meade

#3. 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.

#4. 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

#5. I choose me bristles with pride
Yes, I do
A broom for the shaft
And a broom for the flume
Though I'm covered with soot
From me 'ead to me toes
A sweep knows 'e's welcome
Wherever 'e goes

Richard M. Sherman

#6. 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

#7. Toughened or coarsened by their worldly lives, the other dissenters could shrug and move on, but Souter couldn't. His whole life was being a judge.

Jeffrey Toobin

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. Speaking of Newton but also commenting more broadly on education and the Enlightenment: I have seen a professor of mathematics only because he was great in his vocation, buried like a king who had done well by his subjects.

Voltaire

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.

Harold Bloom

#20. 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

#21. Lincoln bore down or anything he handled, mastering both the details and the principles.

Richard Brookhiser

#22. He saw the pleasure you took from your job every day of his life, and THAT was what he wanted.

David Halberstam

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#26. 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.

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

Geoff Dyer

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. The vocation of putting people straight, of tearing off their masks, of forcing them to face the repressed truth, is a highly dangerous and destructive calling,

Melody Beattie

#31. Every occupation has its own honor before God. Ordinary work is a divine vocation or calling. In our daily work no matter how important or mundane we serve God by serving the neighbor and we also participate in God's on-going providence for the human race.

Martin Luther

#32. 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

#33. 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