"Vocation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spent every available moment loitering about Charley Edwards's dressing-room. He had won a place among Edwards's following not only because the young actor, who could not afford to employ a dresser, often found him useful, but because he recognized in Paul something akin to what churchmen term "vocation." ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... it. Some of them plod patiently along the highway of toil. Others are always leaping fences and trying to find short cuts to wealth. But they are alike in this: whatever they do by way of avocation, the real vocation of their life is to make money. If they fail, they are hard and bitter; if they succeed they are hard and proud. But they all bow down to the golden calf, and their motto is, "Lay up for yourselves ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... Salve sung by the choir, and accompanied by the music of the wind-instruments. The second thing they did in the service of the holy relics was to institute a confraternity or congregation dedicated to those relics with the title and vocation of "all saints." Their object was, each beginning with himself and his own spiritual profit, to strive with all their might for the welfare of their neighbors, by performing works of mercy, in both temporal and spiritual affairs, as their opportunities permit—in which effort they exert ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... 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; is it not?' Arthur reasoned. 'And your vocation, Gowan, may really demand this suit and service. I confess I should have thought that all ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... none too early, it seems, to find you at your vocation. But how are you going to dispose of this ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... Oxford, and in a miserable condition had trotted up to town, in order to see whether she could have better luck with another gallant. One night, as she was strolling through Leadenhall Street in her vocation, she saw her sister Alice and the book-keeper who kept her, walking home with a servant, and a candle and lanthorn before them. Jenny did not think fit to speak to them, but dogging them privately home, called upon her sister the next ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... a little more resistance for the sake of a little more entertainment; but he said to himself, as he had said before, that though it might have its momentary alarms, paternity was, after all, not an exciting vocation. ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... remained would make numerous converts to the cause of liberty; that Mr. Williamson was doing ten-fold more in prison for the cause of universal liberty than he could possibly do while pursuing his ordinary vocation. ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... manner. She was self-possessed, even better acquainted with numbers than with dress, and managed her property herself, which was by no means a trifling thing to do. Liking to make good use of her time, she thought to do it by busying herself in the affairs of others. She had a real vocation for the profession of a consulting lawyer. Usually her advice was sensible and judicious—nothing better could be done than to follow it; only her clients complained that she pronounced her sentences with too little tenderness, without ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... dear lord!" said Consuelo, amazed. "I am not free. I have an object, a vocation, a calling. I belong to the art to which I have devoted myself since my childhood. I could only renounce all this—if— if I loved Albert. That is what I must find out. Give me at least a few days, that I may learn whether I have this love ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... appeared, but there was neither trace of her, nor suggestion of her mode of escape. He called aloud to her; the vacant Woods let his helpless voice die in their unresponsive depths. He gazed into the air and down at the bark-strewn carpet at his feet. Like most of his vocation, he was sparing of speech, and epigrammatic after his fashion. Comprehending in one swift but despairing flash of intelligence the existence of some fateful power beyond his own weak endeavor, he accepted its logical result with characteristic ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... without were in the nature of things utterly impossible, his ruin and grief were within, and only his own assistance could avail. He tried to reassure himself, to believe that his torments were a proof of his vocation, that the facility of the novelist who stood six years deep in contracts to produce romances was a thing wholly undesirable, but all the while he longed for but a drop of that inexhaustible fluency which he professed ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... woman with three thousand a year will soon discover some object of interest," he said, a little dryly. "But it would hardly do to hint at this just now. Nursing in a hospital is a fine work, no doubt, for anyone who has a vocation, but you may as well tell Miss Williams not to ask my advice. She has not the physical strength; besides, in her position, the ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... persistence are centred in its power of enlisting the interest of the laity and of forming them into a corporation. In theory the position of the Jain and Buddhist layman is the same. Both revere and support a religious order for which they have not a vocation, and are bound by minor vows less stringent than those of the monks. But among the Buddhists the members of the order came to be regarded more and more as the true church[291] and the laity tended to become (what they actually have become in China and Japan) pious persons who ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... inspires a love for God and man. This is the Christian hero; this is the man of honor in a Christian land. He is no benefactor, nor worthy of honor, whatever his worldly renown, whose life is absorbed in feats of brute force, who renounces the great law of Christian brotherhood, whose vocation is blood. ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... vocation, Satyavati was seen one day by the great Rishi Parasara, in course of his wanderings. As she was gifted with great beauty, an object of desire even with an anchorite, and of graceful smiles, the wise sage, as soon as he beheld her, desired to have her. And that bull amongst ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... to break down the unnatural distinctions of society, and to render labor of every sort, among all classes, acceptable and honorable. Ignorance is the degradation of labor, and when laborers, as a class, are ignorant, their vocation is necessarily shunned by some; and, being shunned by some, it is likely to be despised by others. Wherever the laboring population is in a condition of positive, or, by a broad distinction, of comparative ignorance, society will always divide ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... can be assured; but only if you supplement your qualifications and make everything you do most effective by using continually, whatever your vocation, ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... in a great city have another alternative; and it is quite as much to escape from the intolerable labours which are imposed upon them in the London season, as from any sexual frailty, that such multitudes of them adopt a vocation which affords some immediate relief, whilst it ensures a doubly fatal termination of their career. The temptations by which these girls are beset might be deemed all-sufficient, without the compulsion by which they are thus as it were, driven out into the streets. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various
... heaping courtly graces upon him, have been exposed to the liability of misconstruction by later ages. Measured by his force of character and his acts he has as little as possible in common with a Leicester or a Hatton. Yet posterity, misled by tradition, has never been sure whether his distinctive vocation were not that of a fine gentleman. Contemporaries, partly from misapprehension, partly from admiration, and partly from jealousy, tried to fasten him to that. When the splendour of his exploits by sea and land demonstrated him to be more ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... students of the college will be required to fill out and sign the regular application blank provided by the college, which must give information regarding the applicant, such as name, place of residence, height, weight, various measurements, past vocation, habits, state ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... you that part of my life, all I dared tell, Domini—but now—why did I enter the monastery? I was very young when I became a novice, just seventeen. You are thinking, Domini, I know, that I was too young to know what I was doing, that I had no vocation, that I was unfitted for the monastic life. It seems so. The whole world would think so. And yet—how am I to tell you? Even now I feel that then I had the vocation, that I was fitted to enter the monastery, that ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... workers to which he himself belonged—the men who are the teachers of mankind. He taught them by his example as well as by his precepts. Whatever else may be said about Carlyle, no one can question that he took his literary vocation most seriously. He was for a long time a very poor man, but he never sought wealth by advocating popular opinions, by pandering to common prejudices, or by veiling most unpalatable beliefs. In the vast mass of ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... flute, and who now reproached him for having neglected to use it in Kungla. He made him fetch it and begin to play, when a crowd gathered round, who made a good collection for Tiidu. The old man gave Tiidu full instructions how to follow the vocation of a flute-player profitably, and Tiidu followed his advice and ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... That is a new vocation struck out by the prolific ingenuity of the female mind. Commonplace doctors would simply call her "hysterical;" but she calls herself magnetic. She is stout and inclined to a large appetite, particularly affecting roast pork with plenty of seasoning; but she passes readily into "the ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... box-lined kitchen-garden on their right beyond the hedge and from the orchard on the left. It was the kind of atmosphere suggesting Nature in her most sensible mood, full-blooded, normal, perfectly fulfilling her own vocation; utterly unmystical, except by very subtle interpretation; unsuggestive, since she was already saying all that could be said, and following out every principle by which she lived to the furthest confine of its contents. It presented ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... happier home than that created by the Indian woman. There was nothing of the artificial about her person, and very little disingenuousness in her character. Her early and consistent training, the definiteness of her vocation, and, above all, her profoundly religious attitude gave her a strength and poise that could not be overcome ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... regular career of any sort is abhorrent to him. "At my return into England, I ruffeled out in my silks, in the habit of Malcontent, and seemed so discontent that no place would please me to abide in, nor no vocation cause mee to ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... people who were calling him "master" in their minds, and watching to see how, in the smallest details of deportment, a "master" carried himself, and the consciousness of this alone amounted to a kind of vocation. The house itself made demands upon him nearly as definite as those of the servants. It was a house of huge rooms, high ceilings, and grandiose fireplaces and stairways, which had seemed to him like a royal palace when he first beheld it, and still produced upon him an effect of undigestible ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... but so domestic as to be respectable, with a woman named Brigit Joyce who kept house for him and cooked potatoes and distilled potheen as well as any female in the district. I do not know if they had many children. If they did, it is probable that these found their vocation in collecting spiders in the stables, or even drifted back into the hill community from which ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... fellowship of wicked companions mislead you, as it hath done me: visit earnestly and often the church; war and strive continually against the devil, with a good and steadfast belief in God and Jesus Christ, and use your vocation and holiness. ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... sought to develop manhood and womanhood after the pattern and by the power that is in Jesus Christ. It calls to its aid every possible force. It educates the mind, the heart, the conscience, the hand. It uses the church, the school, the workshop and the Christian home. Character-building is its vocation, the foundation Jesus Christ, the superstructure such as should stand the test of fire. These oppressed races need above all things else leaders from among themselves. It has been the endeavor of this Society ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., June, 1888., No. 6 • Various
... think vocation might be learnt? I mean mightn't one grow into it, if one wished to very much, and if the life was constantly before one's ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... Augustinianism and universalism, or between the original Luther and the later Melanchthon, by teaching both the absolute inability of man and the universality of divine grace, without an attempt to solve these contradictory positions." (304.) "Thus the particularism of election and the universalism of vocation, the absolute inability of fallen man, and the guilt of the unbeliever for rejecting what he cannot accept, are illogically combined." (1, 330.) The real charge here raised against the Formula of Concord is, that it fails to modify the doctrines of sola gratia or universalis gratia ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... that he was. Perhaps the habit was growing upon him a little of late. He had no abiding place; sometimes he referred to one hill shanty, sometimes to another, as home; but the home-feeling with him was at its fullest and strongest when he was "trampin'." Ostensibly his vocation was that of a travelling farm-hand, but it was all ostentation. Piney would not work. Not while the pony could carry him from hospitable farm-house to hospitable farm-house. He was a knight of the saddle, the uncrowned king of the woods, and Bruce, riding along beside him now, ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... to the astonishment and delight with which he was regarded. He smiled gravely in answer to me, and moved on. But after the scrap he told me that he wished just then that he had continued in his first vocation ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... Schafroff were both keenly interested in politics, and in a recently formed society for mutual education, Yourii read all the latest books, and believed that he had now found his vocation in life, and a way to end all his doubts. Yet, however much he read, and despite all his activities, life had no charm for him, being barren and dreary. Only when in robust health, and when the physical part of him was roused ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... made to contribute both to the history of criticism and to our comprehension of the power of a great writer. In considering him from this point of view we are bound to remember the connection between the different parts of his vocation. In him, more than in most men of letters, the critic resembled the creative writer, and though the critical temperament seems to show itself but rarely in his romances, we find that the characteristic absence ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... now very extensively practiced. This includes diversified farming, rotation of crops, stock raising, the breeding of improved stock, better plowing, and a host of matters connected with the farmer's occupation. Thus farming is becoming neither a job nor an avocation, but a genuine vocation, or profession. It requires for its success all the brains, all the ingenuity, all the attention and push that an intelligent man can give it; and, withal, it promises all the variety, the interest, the happiness, and the success that any ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called.' Now, that thought recurs in other places in the Apostle's writings, somewhat modified in expression. For instance, in one passage he speaks of 'walking worthily of the God who has called us to His kingdom and glory,' and in another of the Christian man's ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... edition, or rather newly-constructed work. Vide preface. Early in the ensuing year (namely, in 1810) appeared Bibliosophia, or Book-Wisdom: containing some account of the Pride, Pleasure, and Privileges of that glorious Vocation, Book-Collecting. By an Aspirant. Also, The Twelve Labours of an Editor, separately pitted against those of Hercules, 12mo. This is a good-humoured and tersely written composition: being a sort of ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... spoke of Colonel Macirone in no very measured terms. "For Murat," he said, "we cannot feel respect, but we feel very considerable pity. Of Mr. Macirone we are tempted to predict that he has little reason to apprehend the honourable mode of death which was inflicted on his master. His vocation seems to be ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... the boy has come out very well in this matter, considering that the finding Mite was to his own detriment; but probably he has found his vocation as a colonist. Still Northmoor might have let him find that ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sentence with a look that startled me. After a pause, he told me that Poland being at her last gasp he had taken refuge in Sweden. There he had sought consolation for his country's fate in the study of chemistry, for which he had always felt an irresistible vocation. 'And I see you recognize as I do,' he added, 'that gum arabic, sugar, and starch, reduced to powder, each yield a substance absolutely similar, with, when analyzed, the same ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... fellow, my vocation summons me elsewhere. By the way, hast thou any apprentices or assistants who ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... great celebrity to his genius or conscience, but only to his vocation, to his faith, and to ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... distant as ever. The inactivity and contradictory policies of the English court had abated the zeal of Gustavus Adolphus, and an irritability which he could not always repress made him on this occasion forget the glorious vocation of protector of the oppressed, in which, on his invasion of Germany, he had ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... after all the illustrious soldiers and politicians she has so plentifully produced. As a child I received from my country precious tokens of interest, and the means of going abroad to develop my artistic vocation. When grown up, and after long years, the young man returns to bring her the fruits of his work and the future of his will, the enthusiasm of the hearts which open to receive him and the expression of a national joy must not be confounded with the frantic ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... The stranger had ceased to doubt, as he had done at the first glance, that she could fix the attention of her rougher hearers, but still he wondered whether she could have that power of rousing their more violent emotions, which must surely be a necessary seal of her vocation as a Methodist preacher, until she came to the words, "Lost!—Sinners!" when there was a great change in her voice and manner. She had made a long pause before the exclamation, and the pause seemed to be filled by agitating thoughts that showed themselves in ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier; to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel, and therefore to become more actively and sincerely virtuous"—that was his vocation; to show that the mutual adaptation of the external world and the inner mind is able to shape a paradise from the "simple produce of the common ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... having no secular priests, but only regulars; all its clergy are monks, taking the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Their vows, however, are not irrevocable; they can relinquish the yellow robe, and return into the world, if they find they have mistaken their vocation. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... first intention. He must be born with the faculty, and along comes the occasion, like the tap on the test tube that induces crystallization. My friend had been several things of no moment until he struck a thousand-dollar pocket in the Lee District and came into his vocation. A pocket, you must know, is a small body of rich ore occurring by itself, or in a vein of poorer stuff. Nearly every mineral ledge contains such, if only one has the luck to hit upon them without too much labor. The sensible thing for a man to do who has found a good ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... Lady Esclairmonde was so like Deborah, come out of a Mystery, that it seemed to be always Passion-tide where she was; and she, moreover, was always guarded in her manner towards them, keeping her vocation in the recollection of all by her gravely and coldly courteous demeanour, and the sober hues and fashion of her dress; but being aware of Malcolm's destination, perceiving his loneliness, and really attracted by his pensive gentleness, she admitted him to far more friendly intercourse than ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... false idea that the Bible is so hard to understand that only the Church can explain it." He had, in a word, discovered his vocation. ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... dispense their tea and coffee; to say nothing of broma for Mr. Talbot, cocoa for Mr. Greenwood, cambric tea for Mrs. Hastings, and hot water for the Darlings. I have to keep a schedule, and refer to it three times a day. This alone shows that boarders are n't my vocation." ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... would continue until all was expended except enough to keep them a week, when sober, and a commission for doing the business, for which I was careful to look out. An individual who bore the name of "One Eye Jack" boarded with us and I could always depend upon him in time of trouble. His vocation for a long time was a mystery, until one evening, as I was passing down a side street, he popped out from an alley and with uplifted blackjack would have felled and robbed me had he not recognized the unearthly yell ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... grand aim of God's help of Israel,—the universal diffusion of His name among all the peoples of the earth. Solomon understood the divine vocation of Israel, and had risen above desiring blessings only for his own or his subjects' sake. Later ages fell from that elevation of feeling, and hugged their special privileges without a thought of the obligations which they involved. God's choice of Israel was not meant for the exclusion ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of existences rising in regular gradation from coarse to fine, from brutal to mental, from earthly composite to simply spiritual, and thus pointing up the rounds of life's ladder, through all nature, to the angelic ranks of heaven. Then, feeling his kinship and common vocation with supernal beings, man is assured of ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... celebrated essay on education, says: "According to the order of nature, men being equal, their common vocation is the profession of humanity; and whoever is well educated to discharge the duty of a man cannot be badly prepared to fill any of those offices that have a relation to him. It matters little to me whether my pupil be ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... beaten already, and had been beaten from the day they gave up their honour. She spoke of the heroism of the troops, and stated that since September last she had been running a soup-kitchen for the wounded. In this humble vocation she had had an opportunity of gauging the spirit of the soldiers. She had seen them sick, wounded, and dying, but had never known them give in. Why should humble villages in France without soldiers in them be shelled? That was Germany, and that was what they saw. The thing was almost ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... question as to just what the position of woman was in society; what God meant by her creation, what was her place. There are some men who think the highest ambition of woman is the wash-tub; that when she finds her vocation there she has fulfilled her mission, and when God has prepared a place for her in the Kingdom of Heaven, He takes her home, and gives her a diploma. There are others who have an idea that the place for woman is a little higher up; ...
— Silver Links • Various
... the crown nor on his face, the chief characteristics of which were the square jaw, the extremely long upper lip, the flat nose, and the very small blue-gray eyes. He looked sixty, and was scarcely fifty. He looked one moment like a Nonconformist local preacher who had mistaken his vocation; but he was nothing of the kind. He looked the next moment like a good hater and a great scorner of scruples; ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... know, devour, like George Eliot, whole systems of philosophy in her early youth. Her passionate pantheism was not derived; it was established in her own soul. She was a mystic, not by religious vocation, but by temperament and by ultimate vision. She offers the apparent anomaly of extreme detachment and of an unconquerable love ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... to make him miserable until he will submit? Clearly, he has not. If he can not persuade him to come to the dispensary and take medicine there is an end to the matter, and he may justly conclude that he is misfitted to his vocation. ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... Adelaide, and he became under-clerk in a business house there, serving an apprenticeship which was to prove useful later on. At twenty he returned to Edinburgh, desiring to enter the ministry, as he believed he had a religious vocation, and plunged into the study of theology with a deep hostility to everything that was outside a strictly literal interpretation of the Scriptures. Full of devotion and self-abnegation in his desperate struggle with the powers of evil, he read the Holy Book with avidity, and was constant in his attendance ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... her control. Words of passionate protest rose to her very lips, but she remembered in time that they would involve revelations which would thwart her purpose to make him happy at every cost to herself. If he ever learned what Clancy had been to her, what he was at this agonized moment, her vocation, if not gone, would be impaired beyond remedy. Afterward, in the solitude of her own room, she accepted this bitter experience, as she had resolved to accept all others, as ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... startled her to see how old he seemed to have grown. She noticed as she had not noticed before the grey in his beard and the pathetic weary look that haunted his eyes. And she understood in that instant that the look his face wore was the look of those who have failed in their vocation. ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... business, love, or strife: But it will not be long Ere this be thrown aside, And with new joy and pride The little actor cons another part, Filling from time to time his 'humorous stage'{15} With all the persons, down to palsied age, That Life brings with her in her equipage, As if his whole vocation ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... feeling all the time that my vocation was one of peace, and that I had no business to be where I was. That is not a pleasant sensation. The great thing for a man to feel in time of danger is that he is at his post and doing his duty. As I was in for it, I determined to do my best to be of me, and to ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... correct the defect of hearing. Such little ones who are destined to a life without sound, should be given every opportunity to learn to read the lips and to secure a good education—to be taught a vocation where eyesight is of more value than hearing. Special institutions are in existence today which can take these deaf mutes when small and so teach them to make audible sounds that they can make themselves ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... needed it, and when you found my love for you might do me harm in the People's honour, you sacrificed your life! Alas, my Lotys! If you could but have realised that through you, and the love of you, I a King, who had long missed my vocation, could alone be truly ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... say that he relaxed his mind: I say that he strengthened it, by vigour of courage subjecting those violent employments and laborious thoughts to the ordinary usage of life: wise, had he believed the last was his ordinary, the first his extraordinary, vocation. We are great fools. "He has passed his life in idleness," say we: "I have done nothing to-day." What? have you not lived? that is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious, of your occupations. "Had I been put to the management of great affairs, I should have made it seen ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... abolish; perhaps, amongst other more obvious purposes, seeking to intercept the earliest buddings of those local attachments which are as injurious to the martial character and the proper pursuits of men whose vocation obliges them to consider themselves eternally under marching orders, as they are propitious to all the best interests of society in connection with the feelings ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... where it is said Senator Benjamin used to vend second-hand clothes, and regretting that he had not continued in that comparatively honorable vocation instead of sinking to his present position—wondering if Jo. Kirby would ever consent, if he were alive, to die wrapped up in a Secession flag!—gazing admiringly upon the unostentatious signboard which is suspended in front of the Hon. Izzy Lazarus's tavern—glancing, wondering, and gazing ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... about there were whispering voices, pointing fingers, and a growing malevolence was ever more sickening. He was beginning too to realise the deep and hidden truth: How easily the breath of scandal destroys the influence and sanctity of those endowed therewith by vocation; how invaluable it is to feel untarnished, and how difficult to feel that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of his sword) one man, a poor old schoolmaster, most pacifically tottering there; and is driven out, by barricade of chairs, by flights of 'bottles and glasses,' by execrations in bass voice and treble. Most delicate is the mob-queller's vocation; wherein Too-much may be as bad as Not-enough. For each of these bass voices, and more each treble voice, borne to all points of the City, rings now nothing but distracted indignation; will ring all another. The cry, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Oscar's first book of poems was written in memory of this sister who died in her teens, whom he likened to "a ray of sunshine dancing about the house." He took his vocation seriously even in youth: he felt that he should sing his sorrow, give record of whatever happened to him in life. But he found no new word for ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... was there also; his crozier was different in shape from the rest, and as an addition to his silken cassock he wore a train. He was accompanied by his daughter. Daring in her assertion of the vocation which had withdrawn her from the gaieties of life she wore the gray robe of a ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... happy in the patronage of the great, who, in the hope of being made excisemen, had come to school to be initiated in the mysteries of gauging,—or grown young men, who, on second thoughts, and somewhat late in the day, had recognised the Church as their proper vocation; and these used to speak of the master's acquirements and teaching ability in the very highest terms. He himself, too, could appeal to the fact, that no teacher in the north had ever sent more students to ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... herselfe curteous and amiable, indued with grace so good as he neuer departed ill contented out of the streate. The gentleman continuing certaine time in those vanities, was desirous to know a far of what she was, of what lineage and of what vocation. And after he had curiously searched out all her original, he vnderstoode by diuers reporte, that she was a Goldsmithes doughter, whose father was dead certaine yeares before, hauinge no more but her ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... in the prince's ear, who, close beside him, listened without losing a syllable, "since you are placed here, monseigneur, in order to learn your vocation of a king, listen to a piece of infamy—of a nature truly royal. You are about to be a witness of one of those scenes which the foul fiend alone conceives and executes. Listen attentively,—you will find your advantage ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of nationalism the manhood of the nation has poured forth in boundless heroism and self-sacrifice, at the call of Christ cannot His Church rise again to its high vocation? If half of the zeal and passion, half of the outpouring of life and treasure, of organization and efficiency, that the State has put into this war could be thrown into the cause of the Kingdom and of the eternal verities, the ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... capital; and the same day, after having, from his little savings, bought a knife with four blades, a packet of quills, and two copy-books, set himself to the work. The good Oratoriens were not deceived as to the true vocation of young Buvat. Caligraphy was with him an art which almost became drawing. At the end of six months, like the ape in the Arabian Nights, he wrote six kinds of writing; and imitated men's faces, trees, and animals. At the end of a year he had made such progress that ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... some exceptions, of course, naturally. The fact is, that marriage has an ennobling influence, and provides a beautiful vocation for a woman—the ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... dignity, not only did he give up all pleasures, but he devoted himself to the strictest religious life. Unfortunately, in those days, all church-men did not understand, as he did, that the duties of their holy vocation were not consistent with these pastimes, for, in the year 507, we find that councils and synods forbade priests to hunt. In spite of this, however, the ancient historians relate that several noble prelates, yielding to the customs of the times, indulged in hunting ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... interest in the resources, raw materials, tools, and processes of one's vocation, and fosters ...
— A Guide to Methods and Observation in History - Studies in High School Observation • Calvin Olin Davis
... was never in the Church, Harry," the widow said, in her sweet low tone, as they walked away together. (Now, it seemed they had never been parted, and again, as if they had been ages asunder.) "I always thought you had no vocation that way; and that 'twas a pity to shut you out from the world. You would but have pined and chafed at Castlewood: and 'tis better you should make a name for yourself. I often said so to my dear lord. How he loved you! 'Twas my lord that made ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... his wife, father of two boys and a girl, has the good taste to make no allusion to his past efforts. Eve had the sense to dissuade him from following his terrible vocation; for the inventor like Moses on Mount Horeb, is consumed by the burning bush. He cultivates literature by way of recreation, and leads a comfortable life of leisure, befitting the landowner who lives on his own estate. He has bidden ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... about the lofty aims and moral influence of art. And this is the lad's ruin. For art is, first of all and last of all, a trade. The love of words and not a desire to publish new discoveries, the love of form and not a novel reading of historical events, mark the vocation of the writer and the painter. The arabesque, properly speaking, and even in literature, is the first fancy of the artist; he first plays with his material as a child plays with a kaleidoscope; and he is already in a second stage when ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Norris Vine said, "the world is full of those who have missed their vocation. I am content to pass amongst the throng. Can I offer you anything before you go? A whisky and soda, or a ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Otway was raised from beggary to temporary affluence by the success of his Don Carlos. [177] Shadwell cleared a hundred and thirty pounds by a single representation of the Squire of Alsatia. [178] The consequence was that every man who had to live by his wit wrote plays, whether he had any internal vocation to write plays or not. It was thus with Dryden. As a satirist he has rivalled Juvenal. As a didactic poet he perhaps might, with care and meditation, have rivalled Lucretius. Of lyric poets he is, if not the most sublime, the most brilliant ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... by the Bishop of Arras, and the consequence was a full and secret negotiation between the two priests. It may be supposed that Philip's short-lived military ardor had already exhausted itself. He had mistaken his vocation, and already recognized the false position in which he was placed. He was contending against the monarch in whom he might find the surest ally against the arch enemy of both kingdoms, and of the world. The French monarch held heresy in horror, while, for himself, Philip had already ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the Civil Power, it will be considered contrary to professional etiquette for any respectable member of the criminal classes to carry on his unimpeded vocation. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... they appear in his works, consist of Vautrin, Les Ressources de Quinola, Pamela Giraud (arranged for the stage by others), La Maratre and Mercadet le faiseur, the last of which has, since his death, been not unsuccessful. But on the whole he did devote himself to his true vocation, with a furious energy beside which even Scott's, except in his sadder and later days, becomes leisurely. Balzac generally wrote (dining early and lightly, and sleeping for some hours immediately after dinner) from midnight till any hour in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... entertained by so dread a personage. Regarding his English visitor merely as a literary man, or professing to do so, Friar Joseph, himself well educated, seemed to enjoy his company, and was unreservedly communicative on every subject not pertaining to his own vocation. When that subject was first introduced by an apparently incidental question, he did not hesitate to return the desired information, telling Dr. Buchanan that the establishment was nearly as extensive as in former times. In the library of the chief ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... not be long Ere this be thrown aside, And with new joy and pride The little actor cons another part; Filling from time to time his "humorous stage" With all the Persons, down to palsied Age, That life brings with her in her equipage; As if his whole vocation Were endless imitation. ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... cases something tangible always remains to exhibit the peculiar style of workmanship belonging to each; and it would often surprise the uninitiated to learn how many traits of character, what indexes of habit and vocation, can be picked up by careful study of the minute points presented for inspection. Unless, however, an agent cultivates a taste for thoroughness even to details and trifles that might at first view appear utterly insignificant, he ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... old Killie, assembled by Willie, To follow the noble vocation; Your thrifty old mother has scarce such another To sit in that honoured station. I've little to say, but only to pray, As praying's the ton of your fashion; A prayer from the muse you well may excuse, 'Tis seldom her ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... extras, but they quickly showed that they were an organic part of the real educative process; they have already reacted on the other subjects of the curriculum, and have, in the earlier stages of education become central. In the same way, vocation is having great influence upon the higher terminal stages of education. All this is part of the most important of all correlations, the correlation of ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... was finished and thoroughly decorated, Poplicola was eager to have the glory of dedicating it. Many of the nobles, however, grudged him this, and were more incensed at this than at all the glory which he had won as a general and as a legislator; for that, they said, was his vocation, but this was not. They stirred up Horatius to oppose him and urged him to claim the right to dedicate the temple. So when Poplicola was of necessity absent on military service, the senate decreed that Horatius should dedicate it, and brought him up into the Capitol ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... love of money. Graft is the first-born of covetousness. But the love of power also plays a part in the debauchery of citizenship; and the central sin of using men as means to our ends is exhibited here on a stupendous scale. This is the vocation of the boss and the briber and the political machinist; and a deadlier way of destroying manhood it would be hard to find. It is not only the interest of other individuals, but the interest of the whole community that the corrupt politician sacrifices ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... thoughtful and traced with cares enough for a whole lifetime, though he had barely reached middle age. There was something severe in his aspect and a rigidity throughout his person—characteristics that caused him generally to be taken for a schoolmaster; which vocation, in fact, he had formerly exercised for several years. The woman, Martha Pierson, was somewhat above thirty, thin and pale, as a Shaker sister almost invariably is, and not entirely free from that corpse-like appearance which the garb of the sisterhood ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... teach, and let your plough be doing. Ye lords, I say, that live like loiterers, look well to your office; the plough is your office and charge. If you live idle and loiter, you do not your duty, you follow not your vocation: let your plough therefore be going, and not cease, that the ground may ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... this part of the operation from becoming a law. So determined was this opposition in some instances that the Consistory of Paris found it necessary to impose on all the mohels an obligation, bound by an oath, that they would respect the law. Those who refused to take the obligation gave up their vocation. ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... first obtained from Isturitz permission for Borrow to print and sell the New Testament in Spanish without notes, he had cautioned him "to use the utmost circumspection, and in order to pursue his vocation with success, to avoid offending popular prejudices, which would not fail to be excited against a Protestant and a Foreigner engaged in the propagation of the Gospel." {215b} This warning the British Minister ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... is a philanthropist on the prairie. We welcomed this news most cordially, and congratulated ourselves that Bordeaux's interested efforts to divert The Whirlwind from his congenial vocation of bloodshed had failed of success, and that no additional obstacles would interpose between us and our plan of repairing to the rendezvous at La ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... which must now become universal. When Captain BATHURST, falling into his humour, assured him that even BEAU BRUMMEL would accept the position with patriotic resignation, Mr. BILLING felt that he had found his true vocation as an arbiter ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... unreservedly at the disposal of the sick for five days, a real debauch of devotion from which she returned tired to death but full of intense delight. Her only regret was that she as yet had no children, and with comical passion, she occasionally expressed a regret that she had missed her true vocation, that of a sister ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... soon followed, and "imagine my delight," he writes, "in receiving one hundred dollars in cash! Though this song was not successful," he continues, "yet the two fifty-dollar bills I received for it had the effect of starting me on my present vocation of song-writer." In pursuance of this decision, he entered into arrangements with new publishers, chiefly with Firth, Pond, & Co. of New York, set himself to work, and began to pour out his productions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... enacted by the Legislature of 1890 that: "Hereafter in this State every avenue of employment shall be open to women; and any business, vocation, profession and calling followed and pursued by men may be followed and pursued by women, and no person shall be disqualified from engaging in or pursuing any business, vocation, profession, calling or employment on account of sex: Provided, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... City and Reno, traveling the distance in less than one hour. To accomplish this feat, he used a relay of fifteen horses. He was afterwards transfered to Idaho where he continued in a similar capacity on a one hundred mile run before quitting the service for a less exciting vocation. ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley
... said, hurrying her words: "Felix, do not put yourself in bonds that might prove an obstacle to our happiness. I should die of grief for having caused a suicide like that. Child, do you think despairing love a life's vocation? Wait for life's trials before you judge of life; I command it. Marry neither the Church nor a woman; marry not at all,—I forbid it. Remain free. You are twenty-one years old—My God! can I have mistaken him? I thought two months sufficed to ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... who value the drama for its lessons in human nature? On that special point something must be said hereafter. Meanwhile, hear one of the sixteenth century poets; one who cannot be suspected of any leaning toward Puritanism; one who had as high notions of his vocation as any man; and one who so far fulfilled those notions as to become a dramatist inferior only to Shakspeare. Let Ben Jonson himself speak, and in his preface to 'Volpone' tell us in his own noble prose what he thought of the average ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... notice the candy man stopping to mop his brow and cool himself beneath her window. In the hands of her maids she was deprived for the time of her vocation—the charming and binding to her chariot of man. To lose time was displeasing to Mademoiselle. Here was the candy man—no fit game for her darts, truly—but of the sex upon which she had been born ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... himself by valiant courage than by living in base subjection, would not rather look to rule like a lord, than to live like an underling; If by reason he were not persuaded that it behoveth every man to live in his own vocation, and not to seek any higher room than that whereunto he was at the first, appointed? Who would dig and delve from morn till evening? Who would travail and toil with the sweat of his brows? Yea, who would, for his King's pleasure, adventure and hazard his life, if wit ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... beside her regret for his own sake that he was still in harness; and a mere change of occupation would be but a tribute to a fastidiousness which he did not himself share. She had frequently tried to think of a vocation for him that would have a more dignified sound, and be less dangerously close to her own path: the post of care-taker at some provincial library, country stationer, registrar of births and deaths, and many others ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... troubled thee to come hither. God knows, I have not done it for myself, and not for mine own honor. I am zealous for the name and the honor of God, and I know thy desire is the same as mine, for it is thy vocation to make the glory of God to prevail on earth. I pray thee, therefore, to grant my petition, tell me with what means I can conquer Satan." Elijah at first endeavored to dissuade the Rabbi from his enterprise. He described the great power of Satan, ever growing as it feeds ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... regretted it. At the public service in the Synod Hall, Principal Rainy gave thanks for "those seventy-four years of happy life." These words are entirely true. His life was an exceptionally happy one. This surely means a great deal. If he had missed his true vocation, he could not ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... public catechising he publicly expounded, and lectured on the Fourth Gospel, in the chapel of the castle. He doubted if he had "a lawful vocation" to preach. The castle pulpit was then occupied by an ex-friar named Rough. This divine, later burned in England, preached a sermon declaring a doctrine accepted by Knox, namely, that any congregation could call ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... tutelage. Theirs is a lofty destiny—lofty because as wives and mothers they are to carry the shrine of civilization into the wilderness, and build upon the desert and waste places the structure of a new civil and social state. Serving as a duty and a pleasure is woman's vocation. The great German poet and philosopher has ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... first went to sea to recover the health which had been somewhat impaired by hard study; but becoming charmed with the profession, he has followed it ever since, and says that it is the most manly vocation in the world. He is a great favorite with the owner of the ship; and when he is at Boston, always resides with him. He will command a ship himself after this voyage. His age is twenty-eight. Mr. Stewart is a handsome man, a polite gentleman, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... particular—the most essential, in reality, of all—his constancy has been remarkable. He has remained true to his vocation. At the moment when his literary brethren, availing themselves of the opening we have noticed, were rushing into public life,—scholars and professors becoming ambassadors and ministers of state, poets and novelists mounting the tribune and the hustings, historians descending into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Church fancy that they are to surpass Melvill or Chalmers! No doubt, reader, you have sometimes come out of a church, where you had heard a preacher aiming at the most ambitious eloquence, who evidently had not the slightest vocation that way; and you have thought it would be well if no man ever wished to be eloquent who had it not in him to be so. Would that the principle were universally true! Who has not sometimes been amused iff passing along ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... when proceeding to the exercise of his vocation, generally carries under his arm a small box containing the instruments necessary, and which consist principally of various pairs of scissors, and the ACIAL, two short sticks tied together with whipcord at the end, by means of which the lower lip ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... care to the pleasure of customers. He was ambitious to lay up money for his wife's and children's sake, as well as to secure for himself the means of rest from labor in his more advancing years. The consequence was, that Andy served his neighbors, in his vocation, to their highest satisfaction. He ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... in its way; at least, I am the last man in the world to criticize the institutions of my native land. But I had fondly hoped that Harold might become a professional musician; and little Otho shows a quite remarkable vocation for the Church. I am not exactly an ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... of my long experience. You may enter into partnership at once, by keeping the books in the morning and going out to visit patients in the afternoon. While I dose the nobility and clergy, you shall labor in your vocation among the lower orders; and when you have felt your ground a little, I will get you admitted into our body. You are a philosopher, Gil Blas, though you have never graduated; the common herd of them, ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... remark directed particular attention to me and I became unpleasantly conspicuous. Scowling glances were bent upon me by two or three of the ruffians, and one fellow made a profane remark not at all complimentary to my vocation—where at there was some coarse laughter. In the meantime I was conscious of being very hungry. My hunger, like that of a boy, is a very positive, thing at, least it was very much so in those days. Glancing toward the maimed and scarred giant who stood behind the bar, I found he was gazing ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... tree, the water in the well, the bread in the sacrament." We may go farther and say that our high emprise does not depend upon husband and children. Married or unmarried, fruitful or barren, with a vocation or without, we must make of the world a home for the race. So far from quarrelling with the hypothesis of the domestic scientists, we turn it into a confession of faith. It is their conclusions that will not bear the test of experience. Because women students ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... our other young friend, Traverse Rocke—partly because, being entirely out of his vocation, he had no right to expect success; but mostly because he had a powerful enemy in the Colonel of his regiment—an unsleeping enemy, whose constant vigilance was directed to prevent the advancement and insure the degradation and ruin of one whom he contemptuously termed ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... in the partisan exercises of after years, now began to exhibit itself. Under this impulse he conceived a dislike to the staid and monotonous habits of rural life, and resolved upon seafaring as a vocation. Such, it may be remarked, was also the early passion of Washington; a passion rather uncommon in the history of a southern farmer's boy. In the case of Washington the desire was only overcome at the solicitations of his mother. The mother of Marion, ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms |
