I dropped my gardening tools, threw my bicycle over a hedge and went in search of fortunes laid beneath the hangman’s noose.

I finally decided what I want to be when I grow up – late.

If our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts.

Our desire is not only to SEE glory, but to participate in the glory we see.

I want to make a difference. But get a job? I worry that will make the ordinary, like everybody else.

Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are...

We feel unfulfilled when there is a gap between what is most important to us, the realm of personal leadership, and what we are actually doing with our time, the realm of personal management. You...

My first vocation was dance.

The extraneous duties, in a sense, were the job.

Did you notice there aren’t any average kids anymore—only Gifted and Disposable?

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.

Faith gives you a concept of the dignity and worth of all work, even simple work, without which work could bore you.

I reject at once an idea which lingers in the mind of some modern people that cultural activities are in their own right spiritual and meritorious — as though scholars and poets were intrinsically more...

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...

We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.

I never heard that it had been anybody’s business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to him. He had been adapted...

Shoddy work is not just shoddy work. It’s a failure of love.

Estudio español, latín y teología, pero desde niño deseaba conocer el mundo y esto era más importante que conocer a Dios y a los pecados de los hombres.

You couldn’t allow yourself to get bored. THAT would be a fight.

There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be...

In the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree....

The divine mandate to use the world justly and charitably, then, defines every person’s moral predicament as that of a steward. But this predicament is hopeless and meaningless unless it produces an appropriate discipline: stewardship....

It’s hard luck always having to be a judge.

Our task is to carry the Lord’s peace into every situation, into every duty.

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...

As for a limit to one’s labors, I, for one, do not recognize any for a high-minded man, except that the labors themselves should lead to noble accomplishments.

The curse of the fall didn’t affect only manual work, as we often seem to think. Excessive ambiguity that prevent us from figuring out how to navigate is really a form of confusion. Overload is...

The author describes Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn as “seldom at ease without a gavel in his hand.

I don’t care much whether I ever get to know anything – but I want to work out something in figures – something that hasn’t got to do with human beings. I don’t want people...

Films are not primarily an entertainment medium. They are weapons. If you understand that, then you are ready to pursue filmmaking as a vocation.

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

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...

He does not call those who are worthy, but those whom He will.

From the outset, Protestantism rejected the critical medieval distinction between the ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ orders. While this position can easily be interpreted as a claim for the desacralization of the sacred, it can equally well...

Our strongest gifts are usually those we are barely aware of possessing. They are a part of our God-given nature, with us from the moment we drew first breath, and we are no more conscious...

Think little of yourselves, but do not think too little of your calling.

Nothing’s work unless you’d rather be doing something else.

And speaking of options ,these kids [the ones who attend elite universities] have all been told that theirs are limitless. Once you commit to something, though, that ceases to be true. A former student sent...

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the...

He was like a man thinking on an abstract subject all the time.

Human” is a kind of midway creature, reflecting God into the world, and reflecting the world back to God.

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...

My hobbies just sort of gradually became my vocation.

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...

Making money isn’t hard in itself,’ he complained. ‘What’s hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one’s life to.

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

We are not called upon to do all the good that is possible, but only that which we can do.

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,...

A great dread fell on him, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken. An overwhelming longing to rest...