Vocation Quotes

I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

Théodore Guérin

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

Gloria Steinem

The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.

William Hazlitt

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

People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.

William Hazlitt

The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent.

E. M. Forster

When I was a little kid I thought I would grow up to be black and sing jazz in nightclubs.

Molly Ringwald

The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years.

C. Wright Mills

Look around the inhabited world; how few know their own good, or knowing it, pursue.

John Dryden

People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.

John Dos Passos

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

Honore de Balzac

He was at a starting point which makes many a man's career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.

George Eliot

To hunger for use and to go unused is the worst hunger of all.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Sometimes you have to do the work and hope the career materializes.

Michael Lipsey

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side.

James Baldwin

Don't worry if your job is small and your rewards few. Remember that the mighty oak was once a nut like you.

Source Unknown

Sometimes you wonder how you got on this mountain. But sometimes you wonder, How will I get off?

Joan Manley

If I had my career over again? Maybe I'd say to myself, speed it up a little.

Jimmy Stewart