What we feel compelled to do, whether it’s making art or giving your life to God, evolves out of the inner fabric of our lives, however disguised the patterns may be to us. The work, the vocation, is an attempt on the part of the would-be artist to fulfill in an inner way, in a symbolic way, what the outer world is failing to provide him with in the service of wholeness.

Something’s your vocation if it keeps making more of you.

My vocation, at last I have found it; my vocation is love

I believe the road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master IN THAT LINE. I have no faith in the policy of scattering one’s resources. Andrew Carnegie

A live-in domestic worker: “You are never sure that your soul is your own except when you are out of the house.”

A young mark twain on the make: “I can’t turn in inkstand into Aladdin’s lamp.”

The horizons of man are incomparably narrower than that of the land on which he toils. Editor of the Nebraska journal.

Western farmers were individualists cheifly in their dreams.

Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself

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

Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed. I am glad to believe that the majority of persons do find their right vocation.

Of course, to be a mother and a housewife is a vocation of a very high kind. But I simply felt that it was not the whole of my vocation. I knew that I also wanted a career. A phrase that Irene Ward, MP for Tynemouth, and I often used was that ‘while the home must always be the centre of one’s life, it should not be the boundary of one’s ambitions.’

The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people.