Category: VOCATION

  • There is a well known saying: “He who lives only for himself never lived.” Then in the service, you must get out of your shell to meet others. You must get out of the “I” sphere to spread your love among all. You feel that your message in life is to do good to all those whom God send in your way. The more you gain experience in life and broadness in the heart, the circle of your service will get bigger. It would not be limited to your house and your family, and not only to your relatives, neighbours, friends and colleagues, but it will reach to a range that is wider and wider…

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, The Spiritual Means

  • and I repeat again St. Augustine’s words: “Love and do as you will.” Don’t worry about what you ought to do. Worry about loving. Don’t interrogate heaven repeatedly and uselessly saying, “What course of action should I pursue?” Concentrate on loving instead. And by loving you will find out what is for you. Loving, you will listen to the Voice. Loving, you will find peace.

    Letters from the Desert
    by Carlo Carretto

  • “Three things the mind is enlightened with: doing good to those who wrong you, enduring what befalls you from your enemies, and abandoning looking at and envying those who are ahead of you in the world.“

    —Abba Arsenius
    Abba Arsenius – The Tutor of the Emperor’s Sons

  • If people don’t either love or hate your work, you just haven’t done all that much.

    —Tinker Hatfield

  • I shall never be one of those directly active (except as a teacher, occasionally), but now and then I am made aware that my work, odd though it seems, does help people.

    Journal of a Solitude
    May Sarton

  • Two years ago we were both unhappy where we were and demanded a change. Two years later, we feel the same. Something is wrong. Something is making us miserable. Only now I’m starting to realize that it’s not our situation, not the job or the commute or living back home, it’s our inability to stomach the misery that is inherent in life.

    Lauren Martin, Enduring Bad Days: Using Sport Mentality To Combat The Work Week

  • I had to admit, I’d had no trouble giving up all of my professional and intellectual responsibilities, it was actually a relief, and I had no desire whatsoever to be that businessman sitting on the other side of our Pro Première compartment, whose face grew more and more ashen the longer he talked on the phone, and who was obviously in some kind of deep shit.

    Submission: A Novel by Michel Houellebecq

  • The town’s poor seem to me often to live the most independent lives of any.

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau

  • There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff. Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him.

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau