"I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you."
— Annie Dillard

"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 good for much unless it is good in itself."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am."
— Parker J. Palmer (Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation)

"Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career."
— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

"Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice “out there” calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice “in here” calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God."
— Thomas Merton

"It's hard luck always having to be a judge."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Night Flight)

"Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Is that what they call a vocation, what you do with joy as if you had fire in your heart, the devil in your body?
"
— Josephine Baker

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

"We are not called upon to do all the good that is possible, but only that which we can do."
— Theodore Guerin (Mother Theodore Guerin: Journals and Letters)