Quotes about Vocation

The passion in our nature urges a human being to choose "the one precious thing," and urges him to pay for it through poverty, conflict, deprivation, labor, and endurance of anger from rejected divinities. It is the warrior that enables the human being to decide to become a musician only, or a poet only, or a doctor only, or a hermit only, or a painter only. It is the lover in a man or woman who loves the one precious thing, and tells him what it is; but it is the warrior in Rembrandt or Mirabai who agrees to endure the suffering the choice entails.

We may say that one's unrealized potential, one's undeveloped growth needs, may become one's fate. Seemingly, life demands not only adaptation to external reality but, equally, adaptation to inner reality, to what one is "meant to be" in terms of the force patterns of the objective psyche. There appears to be a compelling urge to adapt to what one is meant to be-to one's inner truth-which may have little or nothing to do with one's conscious ideas or purposes.

Rise up, you suckers, and go out and do the work of Jesus!

What if we discover that our present way of life is irreconcilable with our vocation to become fully human?

A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.

"Where your talents and the need of the world cross, there lies your vocation."

"Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will effect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything"

Self-acceptance does not come about in practice overnight. Neither does learning how to be patient with ourselves. But if we have any hope of finding a dream vocation or career, we must be on good terms with our hearts, so that we can discover what it is that our inner-man of the heart (to use St. Peter's term) wants to do. For this, patience and self-acceptance are required.

Social entrepreneurs have existed throughout history. St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan Order, would qualify as a social entrepreneur -- having built multiple organizations that advanced pattern changes in his "field." Similarly, Florence Nightingale created the first professional school for nurses and established standards for hygiene and hospital care that have shaped norms worldwide. What is different today is that social entrepreneurship is developing into a mainstream vocation, not only in the United States, Canada, and Europe, but increasingly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In fact, the rise of social entrepreneurship represents the leading edge of a remarkable development that has occurred across the world over the past three decades: the emergence of millions of new citizen organizations.