Don't worry if your job is small and your rewards few. Remember that the mighty oak was once a nut like you.
For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.
It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
Look around the inhabited world; how few know their own good, or knowing it, pursue.
Many people mistake our work for our vocation. Our vocation is the love of Jesus.
My job is quite suitable for full-time mothering
My ultimate vocation in life is to be an irritant.
My vocation is more in composition really than anything else — building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army.
Once you get into this great stream of history you can't get out. You can drown. Or you can be pulled ashore by the tide. But it is awfully hard to get out when you are in the middle of the stream — if it is intended that you stay there.
People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.
Sweetest Lord, make me appreciative of the dignity of my high vocation, and its many responsibilities. Never permit me to disgrace it by giving way to coldness, unkindness, or impatience.
The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side.
The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.
The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.
The world judge of men by their ability in their profession, and we judge of ourselves by the same test: for it is on that on which our success in life depends.
There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.
To hunger for use and to go unused is the worst hunger of all.
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
When I was a little kid I thought I would grow up to be black and sing jazz in nightclubs.