These vocation quotes will inspire you. Vocation is a strong feeling of suitability for a particular career or occupation or a person’s employment or main occupation, especially regarded as particularly worthy and requiring great dedication.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging vocation quotes, vocation sayings, and vocation proverbs.
Famous Vocation Quotes
- “Where your talents and the needs of the world cross; there lies your vocation.” ~ Aristotle
- “A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.” ~ Thomas Merton
- “The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved.” ~ Emma Goldman
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“Many people mistake our work for our vocation. Our vocation is the love of Jesus.” ~ Mother Teresa
- “Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need.” ~ Frederick Buechner
- “An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence.” ~ Honore de Balzac
- “God calls you to make definitive choices, and He has a plan for each of you: to discover that plan and to respond to your vocation is to move toward personal fulfillment.” ~ Pope Francis
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“The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation.” ~ Mark Twain
- “Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny….To work out our identity in God.” ~ Thomas Merton
- “Vocations are born in prayer and from prayer; and only in prayer can they persevere and bear fruit.” ~ Pope Francis
- “In a world so torn apart by rivalry, anger, and hatred, we have the privileged vocation to be living signs of a love that can bridge all divisions and heal all wounds.” ~ Henri Nouwen
- “Each one of us has some kind of vocation. We are all called by God to share in His life and in His Kingdom. Each one of us is called to a special place in the Kingdom. If we find that place we will be happy. If we do not find it, we can never be completely happy. For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God’s will, to be what God wants us to be.” ~ Thomas Merton
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“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” ~ Frederick Buechner
- “We have only to see how that which makes up the reality of our lives relates to our vocation; we have only to hear the call God makes to us to work with him. Quite often it is not a matter of doing something different, but doing it differently.” ~ Jean Danielou
- “Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, therein lies your vocation. These two, your talents and the needs of the world, are the great wake up calls to your true vocation in life… to ignore this, is in some sense, is to lose your soul.” ~ Aristotle
- “When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” ~ Albert Camus
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“Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will ‘turn the necessity to glorious gain.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “Life is so very short. Do now what you yearn to do in your life. You do not have to ‘quit your day job’ in order to do this. You may do so if you choose to, but you do not have to. Many people advance a vocation while holding down their ‘regular job.’ You can, too. Then ease into your vocation and turn it into your ‘regular job.’ But you must give energy to your vocation starting today. I mean, today.” ~ Neale Donald Walsch
- “You will know your vocation by the joy that it brings you. You will know. You will know when it’s right.” ~ Dorothy Day
- “Our vocation, to be beautiful, must be full of thought for others.” ~ Mother Teresa
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“The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people.” ~ Leo Tolstoy
- “The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.” ~ Logan Pearsall Smith
- “Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone’s task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl
- “I’m convinced that the man who has learned to meditate upon the Lord will be able to run on his feet and walk in his spirit. Although he may be hurried by his vocation, that’s not the issue. The issue is how fast his spirit is going. To slow it down takes a period of time.” ~ Charles Stanley
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“Each of us has our own specific vocation, a sacred journey prepared by the Creator of the universe.” ~ Dillon Burroughs
- “A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls.” ~ Sam Keen
- “The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious.” ~ Jean Rostand
- “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
- “Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn’t, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.” ~ Honore de Balzac
- “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
- “The viable jewels of life remain untouched when man forgets his vocation of searching for the truth of his existence.” ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
- “People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.” ~ William Hazlitt
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“Do not worry about your career. Concern yourself with your vocation, and that is to be lovers of Jesus.” ~ Mother Teresa
- “The human being is an animal who has received the vocation to become God.” ~ Saint Basil
- “To be saints is not a privilege for a few, but a vocation for everyone.” ~ Pope Francis
- “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.” ~ Richard M. Nixon
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“It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.” ~ Thomas Carlyle
- “Politics is a noble activity. We should revalue it, practise it with vocation and a dedication that requires testimony, martyrdom, that is to die for the common good.” ~ Pope Francis
- “My Vocation is my Vacation. I love what I do.” ~ Nick Cannon
- “My first vocation was dance.” ~ Victoria Abril
- “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. … I always felt if we were going in to do an album, there should already be a lot of structure already made up so we could get on with that and see what else happened. … I always believed in the music we did and that’s why it was uncompromising. … I don’t think the critics could understand what we were doing.” ~ Jimmy Page
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“It is not more vacation we need — it is more vocation.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
- “Peacemaking is a full-time vocation that includes each member of God’s people.” ~ Henri Nouwen
- “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.” ~ Jimmy Page
- “My job is quite suitable for full-time mothering” ~ Mare Winningham
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“My ultimate vocation in life is to be an irritant.” ~ Elvis Costello
- “Do not live with a vocation that is harmful to humans and nature. Do not invest in companies that deprive others of their chance to live. Select a vocation that helps realise your ideal of compassion.” ~ Nhat Hanh
- “It is well for a man to respect his own vocation whatever it is and to think himself bound to uphold it and to claim for it the respect it deserves” ~ Charles Dickens
- “You must realize that honorary degrees are given generally to people whose SAT scores were too low to get them into schools the regular way. As a matter of fact, it was my SAT scores that led me into my present vocation in life, comedy.” ~ Neil Simon
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“When I was a little kid I thought I would grow up to be black and sing jazz in nightclubs.” ~ Molly Ringwald
- “Well, in the first place, military service, they don’t call it service for nothing. You are actually serving your country. And it is a worthy and valid vocation.” ~ Rick Warren
- “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.” ~ William Hazlitt
- “I knew, despite playing in the NBA, that I would have to prepare for another career or vocation for when my playing days were over, in order to maintain relevancy. I didn’t want to become known for what I used to do.” ~ Len Elmore
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“What if we discover that our present way of life is irreconcilable with our vocation to become fully human?” ~ Paulo Freire
- “Let us seek to live in a way that is always worthy of our Christian vocation” ~ Pope Francis , Christian vocation quotes
- “The goal of recovery is not to become normal. The goal is to embrace the human vocation of becoming more deeply, more fully human.” ~ Patricia Deegan
- “The discernment of a vocation is above all the fruit of an intimate dialogue between the Lord and his disciples. Young people, if they know how to pray, can be trusted to know what to do with God’s call.” ~ Pope Benedict XVI
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“The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.” ~ James A. Baldwin
- “I believe if you follow your heart and do what you love, success will follow. If you enchant yourself, others will be too.” ~ Mark Ryden
- “Working hours are never long enough. Each day is a holiday, and ordinary holidays are grudged as enforced interruptions in an absorbing vocation.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.” ~ S. J. Perelman
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“The most vital right is the right to love and be loved.” ~ Emma Goldman
- “Each man had only one genuine vocation – to find the way to himself….His task was to discover his own destiny – not an arbitrary one – and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one’s own inwardness.” ~ Hermann Hesse
- “Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift of Himself.
Ask and seek and you heart will grow big enough to receive Him and to keep Him as your own. Wherever God has put you, that is your vocation.
It is not what we do but how much love we put into it.” ~ Mother Teresa
Vocation is a summons or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action; especially: a divine call to the religious life.
