Category: VOCATION

  • In any case a reason is a curious thing; if I concentrate all my passion on it, it grows into a huge necessity that can move heaven and earth; if I lack passion, I look down on it with scorn.–I have speculated for some time as to the real reason why I resigned my post as secondary-school teacher. Thinking it over now, it occurs to me that such a position was the very thing for me. Today it dawned on me: that was precisely the reason, I had to consider myself absolutely fitted for the job. So if I’d continued in it I had everything to lose, nothing to gain. Wherefore I thought it proper to resign my post and seek employment with a travelling theatre, the reason being that I had no talent, and so everything to gain. […]

    Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
    Søren Kierkegaard

  • I do not think I am doing anything unworthy of my pen by recommending here that one take good care of keeping his fortune, whether inherited or acquired. For to possess enough to be able, even if one is alone and without a family, to live comfortably in true independence, that is, without working, is a priceless advantage: it grants one exemption and immunity from the miseries and torment attached to human life, as well as emancipation from the general chores which are the natural fate of the children of the earth. It is only by this favour of fate that one is truly a free born man, and really sui juris (his own master), master of his time and his powers, and able to say every morning: ‘The day belongs to me’. Also, between the man who has a thousand pounds of income and the man who has a hundred thousand, the difference is infinitely less than between the former and the man who has nothing. But inherited wealth achieves its highest value when it falls to the one who, endowed with superior intellectual powers, pursues enterprises that are not really compatible with having to earn one’s bread: he is then doubly favoured by fate and can live in full accord with his genius. He will pay his debt to humankind a hundred times over by producing what no one else could produce and giving it what will become its common good, while at the same time making it honourable. Another, placed in such a favoured position, will render himself worthy of humankind by his philanthropic works. Whoever, on the contrary, does nothing of this kind, who does not even try, if only once, as an experiment, to advance a science through serious studies, and does not give himself even the smallest opportunity of doing so, is merely a contemptible idler.

    —Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life’

    In the Presence of Schopenhauer
    Michel Houellebecq

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him.

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another.

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis

  • I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

    Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
    Anne Lamott

  • And then of course there is the damage to oneself. On the milder level, consider the person who is unaware of what she is truly capable of achieving, and is held back all his or her life by low self-esteem.

    How to Be a Sinner
    Peter Bouteneff

  • The most frustrated people are those who feel their lives can only improve when others put forth the necessary effort to make things better.

    Uninvited: Living Loved When You Feel Less Than, Left Out, and Lonely
    Lysa TerKeurst

  • The connoisseur does not merely enjoy his claret as he might enjoy warming his feet when they were cold. He feels that here is a wine that deserves his full attention; that justifies all the tradition and skill that have gone to its making and all the years of training that have made his own palate fit to judge it. There is even a glimmering of unselfishness in his attitude. He wants the wine to be preserved and kept in good condition, not entirely for his own sake. Even if he were on his deathbed and was never going to drink wine again, he would be horrified at the thought of this vintage being spilled or spoiled or even drunk by clods (like myself) who can’t tell a good claret from a bad. And so with the man who passes the sweet-peas. He does not simply enjoy, he feels that this fragrance somehow deserves to be enjoyed.

    —C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

  • We use our cars and clothing and career credentials to craft images of ourselves we wish to promote and project to others, while keeping much about ourselves carefully hidden from view.

    Vainglory: The Forgotten Vice
    Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung

  • Just as a body left idle grows sickly and unattractive, exercise and labor make it healthy and attractive. The same applies to the soul: like iron left unused, it rusts, but when active, it shines brightly. Adversity keeps the soul in motion, just as arts perish without activity. Adverse circumstances stir the soul to action; without them, it would languish.

    —St. John Chrysostom