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Vocation   Listen
noun
Vocation  n.  
1.
A call; a summons; a citation; especially, a designation or appointment to a particular state, business, or profession. "What can be urged for them who not having the vocation of poverty to scribble, out of mere wantonness make themselves ridiculous?"
2.
Destined or appropriate employment; calling; occupation; trade; business; profession. "He would think his service greatly rewarded, if he might obtain by that means to live in the sight of his prince, and yet practice his own chosen vocation."
3.
(Theol.) A calling by the will of God. Specifically:
(a)
The bestowment of God's distinguishing grace upon a person or nation, by which that person or nation is put in the way of salvation; as, the vocation of the Jews under the old dispensation, and of the Gentiles under the gospel. "The golden chain of vocation, election, and justification."
(b)
A call to special religious work, as to the ministry. "Every member of the same (the Church), in his vocation and ministry."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Vocation" Quotes from Famous Books



... what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future movements. He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed him of my intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most promising port for an adventurous whaleman to embark from. He at once resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into the ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... save the very general ones with which the Rules close, and of all scriptural ones, is equally curious whether we refer the Rules to young Washington or to the Rector who taught him. But it would be of some significance if we suppose the boy to have omitted the precept to live "peeceably in that vocation unto which providence hath called thee;" and still more that he should have derived nothing from the following: "Do not think thou canst be a friend to the King whilst thou art an enemy to God: if thy crying iniquity should invite God's judgments to the Court, ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway

... for Tolosa and get shot in a ravine; or go to the Devil in his own way, as long as he lost the track of Dona Rita completely. He then, probably, would get mad and get shut up, or else get cured, forget all about it, and devote himself to his vocation, whatever it was—keep a shop and grow fat. All this flashed through my mind in an instant and while I was still dazzled by those comforting images, the voice of Dona Rita pulled me up ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... Mr. Nicholas Crips would have recognised those crisp tones instantly. Nickie the Kid had found his vocation. ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson

... his friend said, when Frederick confirmed the newspaper account of his having witnessed the sinking of the Roland. "I believe you're a married man and have children and are living in Germany, and as an avocation are doing scientific work, while practising medicine as a vocation. You were thinking of everything else in the world but a trip to America, which never had any charms ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... every capable man of business knows that to take things easily is an easy way to ruin. Language is in a certain sense every one's business; but it is especially the business, as their appellation denotes, of men of letters; and a primary duty of their high vocation is to be jealous of any careless or impertinent meddling with, or mishandling of, those little glistening, marvelous tools wherewith such amazing structures and temples have been built and are ever a-building. Culture, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert

... temptations and opportunities for gain, inviting the enterprising, the skillful and the corrupt to reconstitute patriotism into a commodity and to organize public opinion into a bill of lading. Thus politics as a trade, parties as trademarks, the politicians, like harlots, plying their vocation. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... alluring could tempt us to leave it, Though fraught with all pleasures the fancy can lend. And when far removed to some distant location, The tears of regret will intrusively swell, As mem'ry reverts to our former vocation, And longs for the schoolroom we all loved so well. That old Sabbath schoolroom, that dearly-loved schoolroom, That blessed old schoolroom ...
— Our Gift • Teachers of the School Street Universalist Sunday School, Boston

... are," replied Franklin Marmion, with a short laugh. "I consider ordinary politics—juggling with phrases to delude the ignorance and flatter the prejudices of the mob, and bartering principles for place and power—to be about the most contemptible vocation a man can descend to, but those are low politics in more senses than one. Now high politics, as a psychological study, to an outsider are a very different matter. But I am digressing. I did not invite you here to discuss trivialities like these. I want to ask you—of course, you ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith

... she not have escaped into some vocation? The sole vocation conceivable for her was that of teaching, and she knew, without having tried it, that she abhorred teaching. Further, there was no economical reason why she should work. In 1878, unless pushed by necessity, ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... out some function in the state ... so that he may directly or indirectly further the aim of the state." "Having accomplished this," he says "the next duty of the schools is to accustom the individual to look at his vocation as a duty which he must carry out not merely in the interest of his own material and moral welfare but also in the interest of the state." From this, he says, follows the next and "greatest educational duty of the public school. The school must develop in its pupils the desire and strength ... ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot

... head spy for the Emperor; and this had proved such a profitable business that he had amassed an income of forty thousand pounds. He had been born at Strasburg; and in his early life had been chief of a band of smugglers, to which vocation he was as wonderfully adapted by nature as to that which he afterwards pursued. He admitted this in relating his adventures, and maintained that smuggling and police service had many points of similarity, since the great art of smuggling was to know how to evade, while ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... will release to him the prisoner. The king consents, but threatens Salvatore with death in case of failure. The dead, however, comes to life, and in gratitude offers her hand, through her father, to Salvatore, who declares that it is his vocation to wander over the earth. He asks that the maiden be given ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane

... the use of canoes for coffins has occasionally been remarked, for the writer in 1875 removed from the graves at Santa Barbara an entire skeleton which was discovered in a redwood canoe, but it is thought that the individual may have been a noted fisherman, particularly as the implements of his vocation—nets, fish-spears, &c.—were near him, and this burial was only an exemplification of the well-rooted belief common to all Indians, that the spirit in the next world makes use of the same articles as were employed in this one. It should be added that of ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow

... 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 ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

... I was fitted for was scarce in Orkney. Had I been able to choose for myself I should have been, like my father, a pilot. But the chain of circumstances which had made this the vocation of my family for three generations was now broken. Carver Kinlay and his crew were having things all their own way, and in the meantime I was doing that most trying of all work—waiting and hoping for what seemed to ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton

... indisposes one to vigorous exertion I can well believe, from what I experience in myself, and what I see around me. The ladies do not seem to take the least exercise, except an occasional drive on the Paseo, or public park; they never walk out, and when they are shopping, which is no less the vocation of their sex here than in other civilized countries, they never descend from their volantes, but the goods are brought out by the obsequious shopkeeper, and the lady makes her choice and discusses the price as ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant

... afterwards repented and joined the rising soon after the outset; he had been through most of the incidents, and then when failure was assured had fled south in terror for his life, and was now on his way to the Continent to take up his monastic vocation once more. ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson

... who knows whom, contemplating but II now a vocation so ignoble, shall soon be admired and envied of all, with honour and praise and the fame of high achievement, respected by the high-born and the affluent, clothed as I am clothed' (and here she pointed to her own bright raiment), ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... everlasting God, by whose Spirit the whole body of the Church is governed and sanctified: Receive our supplications and prayers, which we offer before thee for all estates of men in thy holy Church, that every member of the same, in his vocation and ministry, may truly and godly serve thee; through our Lord ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... meretricious productions which every now and then gain popularity for the time. They gave him also a distinct bent towards making literature his profession. But literature, however pleasant and occasionally profitable as an avocation, was not to be thought of as a vocation. Few there are at any period who have succeeded in finding it a substantial and permanent support; at that time and in this country such a prospect was practically hopeless for any one. It is no matter of surprise, therefore, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... divine vocation they are dispersed, and whatever is dispersed is deprived of a great part of its strength. How can the disjecta membra, scattered far and wide by Typhon, become again Osiris? Under the guidance of God, by that great instrument of modern times, the power of association and organization, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... around. When he withdrew his eyes from the furniture he shook out his leg, as Clarence had done his, and gave a pull to his trousers that they might sit properly. He had the word "Rich" painted in big letters all over him, and he seemed to feel it his vocation to show this sense of superiority. Clarence by his side, the living copy of the great man's appearance and manners, strutted and put himself forward like his father, as a big calf might place itself beside the parent cow. Mr. Copperhead did not ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... number him among the flunked. Then when the attack centered among the R's and S's, across the room, he drew forth a pencil and attacked the problem of a practical foot regulator. But immediately the deplorable deficiency of his education struck him. What preparation had he for his life's vocation? Of mathematics he knew absolutely nothing! The priceless years had been squandered on mere Latin, English prose, French verbs ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson

... own experiments; give them a dignity, which should refuse to look forward to marriage as an end, while it would lead them to accept it gladly as a providential help. I did not fear that she would be untrue to her vocation, or easily forsake it for a more domestic sphere. She had not entered it, I could see, without measuring her own purpose and ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska

... Tertullian calls the anima naturaliter Christiana, and it had been trained on the lines of the Tractarian Movement. When he went up to Oxford he destined himself for a diplomatic career, but he now realized his vocation to the priesthood, and was ordained deacon in 1872 and priest two years later. He instantly made his mark as a preacher. Some of the sermons preached in the parish churches of Oxford in the earliest years of his ministry stand out in my memory among his ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell

... at no distant day to break far enough away from the election, the seeming "vocation," of his youth, yet would remain always, and under all circumstances, unmistakably a monk in some predominant qualities of temper. At first it was only by way of thought that he asserted his liberty—delightful, late-found, privilege!—traversing, in strictly mental journeys, ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... spot 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 thus, ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne

... accent on the first syllable. These be heinous offences! A poet, of all men, should cherish the liquid consonants, and should resist the tendency of the populace to make trochees of all dissyllables. In a graver tone we might complain that he sometimes—rarely—writes, not by vocation of the ancient Muses, who were daughters of Memory and immortal Zeus, but of those Muses in drab and scoop-bonnets who are daughters of Memory and George Fox. Some lines of the "Brown of Ossawatomie" we are thinking of now. We can regard them only as a reminiscence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various

... propriety of their application; in which particular he was remarkably independent. The other, Mr. Simpson, was one of those young men, who are in society what walking gentlemen are on the stage, only infinitely worse skilled in his vocation than the most indifferent artist. He was as empty-headed as the great bell of St. Paul's; always dressed according to the caricatures published in the monthly fashion; and spelt Character ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... of the employment from him who pursues it, is one which most men do not take the trouble to make: an effort, indeed, which the majority of men are incapable of making. A vicious priest degrades the priestly vocation—a hypocrite brings reproach upon the religious profession—a dishonest lawyer sinks the legal character—and even the bravest men care but little for promotion in an army, when cowardice and incompetency are rewarded with rank and power. But manifest incapacity, culpable neglect of duty, or ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel

... born at Bitton, near Bristol, began life as a bell-hanger, became first a coal-porter, then a sailor, and finally found his vocation as a pugilist. In his profession he was known, from one of his previous callings, as the "Black Diamond." His first big fight was against George Maddox (January 7, 1805), whom he defeated after ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... in search for incoming vessels. Oftentimes they embarked in their wherries soon after midnight, and early morn found them five or six miles from shore. Everybody suddenly developed into an experienced navigator, and curious schemes were originated in the endeavor to outwit each other. This vocation is no longer profitable, and the natives have relapsed into their former monotony. So far away from the sound of a church-bell, it would be no easy matter to tell when the Sabbath morn arrives, were it not for the radical change that comes over these hardy longshoremen. ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various

... before us, then, let no one conclude that he can not get time from his daily vocation, whatever it may be, to cultivate his mind, and develop his moral and intellectual faculties. Another essential element in ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen

... got a vocation, nobody ever had one," said Jocunda, mentally. "Deary me, I wish I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... before to live with her aged relative, the cousin of my father, and the mother of his first wife. Aunt Jenny had resided for many years after this time with an aged widow lady, who had lived apart in quiet gentility on very small means; and now that she was dead, my aunt saw her vocation gone, and wished that she too could live apart, a life of humble independency, supporting herself by her spinning-wheel, and by now and then knitting a stocking. She feared, however, to encounter the formidable drain on her means of a half-yearly room-rent; and, as ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... rate, young Esmond of the army was quite a different being to the sad little dependant of the kind Castlewood household, and the melancholy student of Trinity Walks; discontented with his fate, and with the vocation into which that drove him, and thinking, with a secret indignation, that the cassock and bands, and the very sacred office with which he had once proposed to invest himself, were, in fact, but marks of a servitude ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray

... too early, it seems, to find you at your vocation. But how are you going to dispose ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society

... the chefe principles of our faith, will become lesse contentious, and be contented with the truthe in relligion alreadie established by authoritie. So they that shall beare the name of Christians shall shewe themselves worthye of their vocation, so shall the mouthe of the adversarie be stopped, so shall contention amongest brethren be avoyded, so shal the gospell ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt

... Essenes was called, Caleb did not appear. Nor did he answer to his name on the next day, or indeed ever again. None knew what had become of him until a while after a letter was received addressed to the Curators of the Court, in which he announced that, finding he had no vocation for an Essenic career, he had taken refuge with friends of his late father, in some place not stated. There, so far as the Essenes were concerned, the matter ended. Indeed, as the peasant who was concealed in the gully ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard

... believed, with pathetic simplicity of perception, that all this was due to the slow maturing of his love for her, and that he was still able to make her happy. But this was something to be thought of later. Just now Providence seemed to have offered him a vocation and a purpose that his idle adolescence had never known. He did not dream that his capacity for patience was only the slow ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte

... five years after Byron died. "This, and indeed every evening, I believe, Lord Byron was the subject of his praise. He compared the brilliancy and clearness of his style to a metal wire drawn through a steel plate." He expressed regret that Byron should not have lived to execute his vocation, which he said was "to dramatize the Old Testament. What a subject under his hands would the Tower of Babel have been!" Byron's views of nature he declared were "equally profound and poetical." Power in all its forms Goethe had respect for, and he was captivated by ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... 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

... of May Mr. Wilberforce, who had been labouring in his vocation session after session, without making any visible progress in the noble cause he had espoused, moved for the appointment of a committee to consider the propriety of introducing a bill for the abolition of the slave-trade, after a time to be limited. Both Pitt and Fox supported the philanthropist, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... silence, the characteristics which destroyed the charm of a conventual life. When she came to the years of discretion, she was to be professed; but, in accordance with an old custom, before her profession she required to enter the world for a season, that her 'vocation' might be judged of, whether it were true or not, or simply the effect of education on the one hand, and of ignorance on the other; and thus, when she was fifteen years of age, she was dismissed to her father's house for the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various

... is a type of Christ. There is the same overruling by divine Providence, the same direction of all events for the good of the kingdom of God. Moses is first withdrawn from threatening danger by flight into distant regions. As soon as it is time that he should enter upon his vocation, the door for the return to the scene of his activity is opened to him. Just so is it with regard to Christ.—Vers. 21-23 have for their sole foundation the prophetic declaration: [Greek: hoti Nazoraios klethesetai] (compare, on these words, the remarks on Is. xi.). The particular circumstances ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg

... born in 1738 at a little Pennsylvania frontier settlement. His parents were Quakers, and to the rigor and simplicity of frontier life were added those of that sect. But even these handicaps could not turn the boy aside from his vocation, for he was a born painter, if there ever was one. At the age of six he tried to draw, with red and black ink, a likeness of a baby he had been set to watch; a year later, a party of friendly Indians, amused ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson

... Jefferson Doman, who had once been of some service to him, and love of whisky, which certainly had not. He had been among the first in the rush to Hurdy-Gurdy, but had not prospered, and had sunk by degrees to the position of grave digger. This was not a vocation, but Barney in a desultory way turned his trembling hand to it whenever some local misunderstanding at the card table and his own partial recovery from a prolonged debauch occurred coincidently in point ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce

... a drawing-master? He told me that he had suffered so much learning why he could never paint, nor hope to paint, that he was determined to devote his knowledge to the service of apprentices. It seemed to him such an awful thing to mistake one's vocation. Now I feel that one of us—perhaps both of us, you and I, are doing even a worse thing. We are deliberately ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... strange stories are related of him, by the Mohammedans, in honour of their Prophet, or by the eastern Christians, in derision of the Impostor. He is said to have been a rich Greek priest, settled at Boszra, and to have predicted the prophetic vocation of Mohammed, whom he saw when a boy passing with a caravan from Mekka to Damascus. Abou el Feradj, one of the earliest Arabic historians, relates this anecdote. According to the traditions of the Christians, he was a confidential counsellor ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt

... became yet more eminently domestic, combining household ties with the pursuit of letters and science in colleges which still preserved a family life. Its monks had no vocation to the life of the desert; in this unlike the Irish saints, who, like those of Eastern lands, delighted in the forest hermitage ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... solemn resolution and deep devotion of mind, than is necessary to make them acceptable to our own frail companions in this valley of darkness? This I say to thee, my son, not as meaning to deter thee from the good path thou art now inclined to prefer, but that thou mayst make thy vocation and ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... sphere could afford room for the vocation so aptly described in the following sketch of his "ways and means," given in a recent picture of life in Paris by a sycophant of millionnaires, at a period when interests, not rights, are the watchwords of the nation?—"Mon rle de familier dans une vritable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... larnin', and book-larned men." Of course, with these ideas, Julian's education was limited to a few quarters' schooling under an old pedagogue, whose native language was Dutch, and who never took very kindly to the English tongue. Besides, teaching was only an episode with him; for his vocation was that of a clergyman, and he held forth on Sundays in alternate Dutch and English to his little congregation—as is still the custom in many of the small agricultural parishes in New York State, where the scene of our ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage

... many; where, neither freemen nor slaves, but placed in an anomalous grade which they do not understand and others disregard; where no kind instructer, no hope of preferment, no honorable emulation prompts them to virtue or deters from vice; their industry waste, not accumulation; their regular vocation, any thing or nothing as it may happen; their greater security, sufferance; their highest reward, forgiveness; vicious themselves and the cause of vice in others; discontented and exciting discontent; scorned ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison

... of purpose, the two Van Winkles set about to teach their partners how to play better golf than they had ever played before. By the time they were playing the long eighth hole, the young men were so exercised over the discovery of a vocation that they sliced badly into the rough. Trudging side by side through the tall grass, looking for balls which the caddies had lost, they addressed each other ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon

... celestials. And while the saint was taking up the intended offering for those celestial twins, Indra pronounced his interdiction, saying, "These Aswins both of them in my opinion have no right to receive an offering of the Soma juice. They are the physicians of the celestials in heaven,—this vocation of theirs hath disentitled them (in the matter of Soma)." Thereupon Chyavana said, "These two are of mighty enterprise, possessed of mighty souls, and uncommonly endued with beauty and grace. And they, O Indra, have converted me into an eternally youthful person, even like unto ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... minds the work you would like to do when you leave the Home of the Students. You shall do [-that which-] {what} the Council of [-Vocations-] {Vocation} shall prescribe for you. For the Council of Vocations knows in its great wisdom where you are needed by your brother men, better than you can know it in your unworthy little minds. And if you are not needed by your brother [-man,-] ...
— Anthem • Ayn Rand

... astonished on hearing the razor-grinder ply his vocation in the very depths of our solitudes; for here he is a flying instead of ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... 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 ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch

... left the ministry, in 1889, I took up, with a great deal of zeal, the study of the poet Browning. I had already yielded to the charm of Ruskin—whom I personally knew—and Carlyle, but Browning opened up a new world of elevated thought to me, in which I am still a happy dweller. In seeking a new vocation I naturally gravitated towards several lines of thought and study, all of which have influenced materially my later life, and all of which I pursued with the devotion accorded only to hobbies. These were I: A deeper study of Nature, in her larger ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James

... some intellectual calling in the sustaining consciousness that he need not debase himself, nor do violence to his convictions, in order to achieve success therein, since he can live and thrive in another (if you choose, humbler) vocation, if driven from that of his choice. This buttress to integrity, this assurance of self-respect, is to be found in a universal training to efficiency in ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... period if any one asked me what I hoped to be in the future, when a man, without hesitation I would answer: "I expect to be a minister,"—and to me the religious vocation seemed the very grandest one. And those about me would smile and without doubt they thought, inasmuch as I too wished it, that it was the ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti

... his life work lay in that direction. He had been so successful in athletic sports and took such pleasure in them that he yielded to his natural bent and decided to adopt professional baseball as his vocation. ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick

... is all very well in its way; at least, I am the last man in the world to criticise 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... had an income and a vocation; a charming little home was awaiting their coming, off in a convenient suburb; and, best of all, Bessie was an accomplished house-keeper, having studied under the best mistresses of that art to be found in the country. And even if she had not ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs

... in my line, you know. Of course I think your boy very funny, very cunning, very—anything you like to fancy him, but forgive me if I am glad he does not belong to me. There, don't you see now that marriage is not my vocation, so please give up speaking to me ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... useful talent than the ability to think and speak (or write) clearly and simply, no matter what our vocation in life. None know better how difficult it is to find writers with a good narrative style than those editors whose training and experience have made them realize its value and importance. If we examine the experience of those who, in ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten

... your own some day—who knows!" He looked up at Janet amusedly and then, with a spring, stood upright, his easy, unconscious pose betokening command of soul and body. "I ought to have kept a store," he observed. "I missed my vocation." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... those few years at the Convent of the Ursulines. Juliette had hoped that she had a vocation; her whole soul yearned for a secluded, a religious, life, for great barriers of solemn vows and days spent in prayer and contemplation, to interpose between herself and the memory of that awful night when, ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... equaled since. Politics and religion hardly surpassed it in the power of creating cabals and sects and in stirring up animosities. This was specially marked in music. The great Handel, who had not then found his true vocation as an oratorio composer, was in the culmination of his power as manager of the opera, though he was irritated by hostile factions. The musical quarrels of the time were almost as interesting as the Gluck-Piccini war in Paris in the latter part of the same century, and the literati took ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris

... answered, taken by surprise. "I suppose so. It is a relief to talk, and to listen, I have told you, is my vocation." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various

... you see, my dear, the church is his profession, not his vocation. He is a brilliant pulpit orator, with influential friends; but every brilliant pulpit orator is not necessarily a saint. And as for his quarreling with his wife and ill-using their step-daughter, we have heard but one side of ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... the day of his death. Many a time, when out of the pit, I reminded him of the incident. It was from the little man at the employment desk of the Twenty-third Street Y.M.C.A. that I got my real introduction to business life—if the vocation of a porter ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine

... the thought mighty sorrow instils, The sins of the world are the terrible hills An eclipse which do cause, or a dread obscuration, To one or another in every vocation. ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... took little part in the talk at the table. Never a question was asked him as to his mission in the mountains, or the length of his stay, his vocation, or his home. That extreme courtesy of the mountaineers, exemplified in their singular abstinence from any expressions of curiosity, accepted such account of himself as he had volunteered, and asked for no more. In the face of this standard of manners any inquisitiveness on his part, such as ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... captain was Captain Fury: he was captain over the vocation doubters; his standard-bearer was Mr. Darkness, his colours were those that were pale, and he had for his scutcheon the ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan

... above their ragged tops. Then she began to talk; disjointedly at first, but the scenes she recalled got clearer as she went on, and she forgot her audience. It was her business to make things plain; she had studied this part of her vocation and unconsciously used her power to seize and hold the other's interest, but she did not know that she was drawing a lifelike portrait of her guide. Mrs. Farnam knew, and with a tactful question here and there led the ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss

... establisher her arm-chair here, and a stand for her workbasket. Hepsey and Temperance were at hand, the men came for orders, and it was convenient for the boy to transmit the local intelligence it was his vocation to collect. The windows commanded a view of the sea, the best in the house. This prospect served mother for exercise. Her eyes roved over it when she wanted a little out-of-doors life. If she desired more variety, which was seldom, she went to the kitchen. After ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard

... Could he ask this child of luxury to go with him to the far West and share his life of toilsome privation? He had long felt that the work of a missionary was his vocation. She had never had any such feeling. He recalled her words, spoken but yesterday, it seemed: "Do you imagine that any nice girl will go out with you among the ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... primary class, was divided into two camps, the Oscarians and the Feklitusians. Oscar had on his side all the independent fellows, all the sons of well-to-do peasants, all the sons of mechanics who were to follow in their fathers' footsteps, and all those whose future vocation was decided on, from the coachman ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri

... much of her disposition, had been turned off by a young fellow she had run away with from 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 ...
— 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

... sheep-shears, and as soon as the shower abated, sent Halstead off to notify a man at the Corners, named Peter Glinds, a professional shearer, that his services would be required on the following day. "Old Peter," as he was called, had made shearing sheep his spring vocation for many years; he was a very tall, lean, yellow old man, who was reported to use a plug of tobacco a ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... of his energy in his vocation is to be found in the little collection of cases entitled Examples of the Interposition of Providence, in the Detection and Punishment of Murder, published, with Preface and Introduction, in April 1752, and prompted, as advertisement ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson

... delivered from the dropsy, which I consider as the original and radical disease. The town is my element[1111]; there are my friends, there are my books, to which I have not yet bid farewell, and there are my amusements. Sir Joshua told me long ago that my vocation was to publick life, and I hope still to keep my station, till GOD shall bid me Go ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell

... as it appeared in art is drawn in this poem. Lippo Lippi became a monk by chance; it was not his vocation. A starving boy, he roamed the streets of Florence; and the widespread intelligence of the city is marked by Browning's account of the way in which the boy observed all the life of the streets for eight years. Then the coming change of the aims of art ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... was, like other historic personages whom we have already encountered, a victim of dissociation. There is no gainsaying the fact that he was of a distinctly nervous temperament; and it is equally certain that he chose a vocation, and placed himself in an environment, which would tend to make a dissociated state habitual with him. But this is bringing us to the consideration of a psychological problem which would itself require a volume for adequate discussion. Enough to add that, when all is ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce

... comes only to a man when he is giving forth, when he is in love, having lost the love of self. Giving forth purely the best of self, as the great workmen do, a man is on the highway to the divine vocation which is the love and service ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... time satisfy the desire that has of late sprung up for a more stirring life than that of the Church, and should be able to remain your comrade. On the other hand, I have always regarded the Church as my vocation, and did not like to go back from it, and moreover, although stronger than of old, I thought that I might never attain such health and strength as might render me a worthy knight, and feared that when tried I should be found wanting. Thus I have wavered, ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty

... aristocrat, if he excels in his vocation: he is an aristocrat, if he turns a better or a straighter furrow than his neighbor. The poorest poet is an aristocrat, if he writes more feelingly, in a purer language, or with more euphonic jingle than his cotemporaries. The fisherman is an aristocrat, if he wields his ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders

... his life had Roland found business so interesting. He said to Denas, as they talked over the affair at their own fireside, that he thought he also had found his vocation. He felt at home on the stage. He never had felt at home in a bank or in a business office. He was determined to study, and create a few great characters, and become an actor. He felt the power; it was in him, he said complacently. "Now," he added, "Denas, ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... passion." He had none of the ordinary ambitions for rank, title, or social position. "His great ambition—his ruling passion—was to win a high reputation for skill, integrity, and success in the difficult vocation of a contractor for public works; to give large employment to his fellow-countrymen; by means of British labour and British skill to knit together foreign countries; and to promote civilization, according to his view of it, throughout ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... to my great disappointment, though he took nothing with him. The Russian thieves are also very expert at picking pockets, and at the time of the coronation they had plenty of opportunities in exercising their vocation. Harry and I lost our pocket-handkerchiefs one day, but after that we followed Cousin Giles' advice, and fastened them into our pockets. The Russians are great traders; they begin their mercantile pursuits at a very early age. Little fellows, who would be playing ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston

... ever the fact of war was in evidence. A considerable space in and near the station had been roped off and sentries refused to allow any to pass who could not prove that they had a right to do so. The ordinary peaceful vocation of the great ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske

... could not help 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 ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston

... something else yet to do in my special vocation. In 1854 I took out a patent for puddling iron by means of steam. Many of my readers may not know that cast-iron is converted into malleable iron by the process called puddling. The iron, while in a molten state, is violently stirred and agitated by a stiff iron rod, ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... A vocation is something you do for a living, an avocation something you do for a while, a vacation something you couldn't stick at very long without being dead ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher

... dented with a dimple which, combined with a certain occasional whimsicality of opinion and glance, had caused Elder Trewin some qualms of doubt regarding the fitness of this young man for his high and holy vocation. The Rev. Jabez Strong had never indulged in dimples or jokes; but then, as Elder Trewin, being a just man, had to admit, the Rev. Jabez Strong had preached many a time and oft to more empty pews than full ones, while now the church was crowded to its utmost capacity on Sundays ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... with a predominant instinct, with some vocation or some desire which has been evoked as soon as they begin to speak ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... master who is peculiarly the Venetian of the eighteenth century, a genre-painter whose charm it is not easy to surpass, yet one who did not at the outset find his true vocation. Longhi's first undertakings, specimens of which exist in certain palaces in Venice, were elaborate frescoes, showing the baneful influence of the Bolognese School, in which he studied for a time under Giuseppe Crispi. He attempts to place the deities of Olympus on his ceilings in emulation of ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps

... and lively, once in the midst of the fields or woods; if it were only to see you there, it was pleasure to me. But let me look at you again! How this little round cap becomes you! how pretty you look. Decidedly, it was your vocation to wear a peasant's cap, as it was mine to wear the grisette's. Now you are according to your wishes, you must be happy, it does not surprise me. When I did not see you any more, I said to myself, 'Good little Goualeuse is ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue

... into Mississippi and Arkansas, and has adopted the policy of employing Negroes to act as demonstrators among farmers of their own race in order to furnish the Negro farmers with greater incentive to become more skilful and industrious in their vocation.[102] ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various

... only permanent and universal business carried on around them! Ignoble truly! never to feel the stirrings of high impulse, prompting to imitate the eminent pattern set before them in the daily vocation of "Honorables" and "Excellencies," and to emulate the illustrious examples of Doctors of Divinity, and Right and Very Reverends! Hear President Jefferson's testimony. In his Notes on Virginia, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... or a John has won for the Master, in their vocation as 'fishers of men,' are their 'hope and joy and crown of rejoicing, in the presence of our Lord Jesus.' The great benediction which the Spirit bade the Apocalyptic seer write over 'the dead which die in the Lord,' is anticipated in both its parts by this mysterious meal on the beach. 'They rest ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... their only son the vocation of their later life. He might be anything he liked. Did he lisp in numbers, the boyish rhymes were duly scanned and criticised; had he a turn for painting, lessons were provided. He might be anything he chose, and everything by turns. Many ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... country-fellows, all trying to sell oil-lands; every one had a great bargain at from thirty or forty thousand dollars downwards. The lowest in the lot was a boy of seventeen or eighteen, a loutish-looking youth, who looked as if his vocation had been peddling apples and lozenges. He had only a small estate to dispose of for $15,000 (3,000 pounds), but he was very small fry indeed. My companions met with many friends; all had within a few days or hours ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... born and bred in Massachusetts. They are Harriet Hosmer, Margaret Foley and Anne Whitney. Harriet Hosmer was the first to free herself from the traditions of her sex and follow her profession as a sculptor. When she desired to fit herself for her vocation there was no art school east of the Mississippi river where she could study anatomy, or find suitable models. Margaret Foley, who, amid the hum of the machinery of the Lowell cotton mills, first conceived the idea of chiseling her thought on the surface of a "smooth-lipped ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... instructresses, which had been arranged without the necessary permit, and that you sang there with them songs of a worldly and reprehensible character. Therefore, dear sir, I beg you in the future not to permit yourself similar actions unbecoming to your schoolmaster's vocation, and I herewith warn you that at a repetition of such behaviour you will be immediately discharged ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub

... the best thing you can do now is to give up medicine altogether. If, with your abilities, you cannot succeed in passing the examination, it's evident that you have neither the desire nor the vocation for ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... by the engineer, were briefly these: Frank was not possessed of the necessary abilities to fit him for his new calling; and it was useless to waste time by keeping him any longer in an employment for which he had no vocation. This, after three years' trial, being the conviction on both sides, the master had thought it the most straightforward course for the pupil to go home and candidly place results before his father and his friends. In some other pursuit, for which he ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... Mrs. Quirk had absolute confidence in the girl's vocation as a reformer. The old lady was never told of a good-for-nothing son or ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin

... women in general, their vocation, their aims, and their future state, is it at all likely that we should ever arrive at even a fair discussion of marriage and marriage laws? With us, women have souls, and, what is a great deal more, seem likely to have votes. They certainly have the respectful and courteous ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford

... you not mistaken with regard to your vocation,—are you not mistaken in supposing it to be the ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... Longfellow's main vocation was away from the turmoils of the hour. He interpreted to America the art, the culture, the legends of Europe and the Middle Ages; he found the poetry in the early soil of America, as in "Hiawatha" and "Evangeline." He was not deaf to the wrongs of the slave, and gave ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... conveyed no diminution of esteem; for the collapse of the girl's momentary resistance (mute and modest thought it had been) seemed only her tribute to the truth of things. She didn't presume to judge others, but she had judged herself; she had seen the reality. She had no vocation for struggling with combinations; in the solemnity of sequestration there was something that overwhelmed her. She bowed her pretty head to authority and only asked of authority to be merciful. Yes; it was very well that Edward Rosier ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James

... went out by next mail from Mr. Whitney's office, saying that Jasper looked poorly enough when he was met in New York; that he seemed incapable of breathing any other air than that saturated with business; that he had evidently mistaken his vocation when he chose to be a publisher. "Beside, there isn't any money now in the publishing business," added Mr. Whitney as a clincher; "there are too many of the fellows cutting each other's throats to make it pay; and books are slaughtered ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney

... lilies, tulips, iris, carnations, tube-roses, poppies, heliotrope—all manner and description of flowers, five hundred acres of them, solid, thick, exuberant; blooming and fading, and leaving their seed or slips to be marketed broadcast all over the United States. This had been the vocation of Angele's parents—raising flowers for their seeds. All over the country the Seed ranch was known. Now it was arid, almost dry, but when in full flower, toward the middle of summer, the sight of these half-thousand acres royal with colour—vermilion, azure, flaming ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... shop-windows, or watching the busy life in the harbor. That the latter had a strong attraction for him there can be no doubt, for though he followed his father's trade till early manhood, he finally found his real vocation as a seaman. It was on the ocean that true romance dwelt, for it led to strange lands and peoples, and no one knew what wonders and mysteries lay behind each horizon. It was there, too, high courage was developed and endurance, for it was there that men did battle hand to hand with nature's mightiest ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson

... reached her sixteenth year, and possessing more than ordinary ability, resolved to prepare for the vocation of teaching; and within a year from the time she had formed such resolution, was actually engaged as teacher of the ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour

... store-house until a dairy could be built up. A very neat bridge had been thrown across the stream, and every morning the two girls, generally attended by Henry, Alfred, or Captain Sinclair, crossed over, and soon became expert in their new vocation as dairy-maids. Altogether, things began to wear a promising appearance. Henry and Mr. Campbell had dug up as fast as Martin and Alfred cleared away the brushwood, and the garden had already been cropped ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat

... bonnets to Miss Clementina on the strength of the brownstone front, took his seat on the other end of the piano, and gave Mr. Rickarts distinctly to understand that he was glued to it. The man milliner was a powerful fellow, and looked as if his proper vocation were hammering stone or rolling iron, instead of handling flowers and feathers. Rickarts murmured something inaudibly, at first but, on taking a second survey of his neighbor, concluded that he would be more desirable as an ally ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... made against whalemen, and which, in the estimation of some already biased minds, might be considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of the Frenchman's two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous aspersion has been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to rebut. They hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... gratitude, though it cost a pang to think of leaving the home that had sheltered them under many vicissitudes. Besides which, it was a matter of doubt to Signora Mortera and her eldest son whether any worldly promotion could justify his deserting the priestly vocation to which he had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various

... of imagining a society of equals I do not intend to speak. The average man, who cannot understand equality of human dignity, equality before God, thinks nothing of demanding equality in externals, equality in responsibility and vocation. But this sham equality is the enemy of the true, for it does not fit man's burden to his strength, it creates overburdened, misused natures, driving the one to scamped work and hypocrisy, and the other to cynicism. Every accidental and inherited advantage must indeed be done away with. ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... modern business is so delicate that extreme care must be taken not to interfere with it in a spirit of rashness or ignorance. Many of those who have made it their vocation to denounce the great industrial combinations which are popularly, although with technical inaccuracy, known as "trusts," appeal especially to hatred and fear. These are precisely the two emotions, particularly when combined with ignorance, ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt

... that; the true sympathy never thinks of itself at all. It is simply concentrated upon one thought—how can I, in this trial-time, when my brother or my sister is stricken down by my side, how can I nerve and strengthen him or her to rise to the glorious vocation to which God has called him or called her, to strengthen them to be what God would have them be? And that was the sympathy, was it not, that Christ gave perpetually. It was within Him like a spring working by law, a spring which had all the regularity, as well as the spontaneity, of some beautiful ...
— The After-glow of a Great Reign - Four Addresses Delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral • A. F. Winnington Ingram

... and that the Church had, in her promulgation of the Law of Love, anticipated the Socialist's discovery by about two thousand years. Further, that in the Religious Orders these ideals had been actually incarnate; and that by the doctrine of Vocation—that is by the freedom of the individual to submit himself to a superior—the rights of the individual were respected and the rights of the Society ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson

... always a thinker. He had a way of dressing up a bit of philosophical observation into a story very happily. He had much feeling for symbol, and, like the old architects, would fill all things, pretty or ugly, with meaning. When one reads these stories, one does not feel as if it were the writer's vocation to be a story-teller, but as if he were using the story as a philosophical toy. And it was fortunate for him that he fell on an age of periodicals, a class of works which just suited his genius. He and the modern development of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... discharge he lived by his wits and looks, but when this grew unproductive of ready cash, he decided to seek employment in his accredited vocation. ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx

... the Roman court, and of the bishops and clergy of his time, particularly those of his native land. He is especially severe in censuring their immorality and ignorance; and, like Wycliffe, condemns the monks and friars for inveigling into their order young novices who had no vocation for a celibate life, and ought rather to have been encouraged to enter into honest wedlock. But he was a stern opponent of heresy—Lutheran as well as Wycliffite—a subtle defender of Roman doctrine; and in dedicating to Archbishop Betoun his Commentary on St Matthew's Gospel, he congratulated ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell

... among others to the gentleman who at that time presided over an art museum at another University. It was to be expected that the story should make a considerable impression on the mind of a man whose vocation lay in lines similar to Dennistoun's, and that he should be eager to catch at any explanation of the matter which tended to make it seem improbable that he should ever be called upon to deal with so agitating an emergency. ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James

... said, "Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call." It is no small thing, in this grim world, to make people smile, to be absurd for their alleviation, to render all things "sympathetically ridiculous" for a time, to bear in a chalice of mirth the water of Lethe. If one's talent lies that way, why, the ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton

... 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

... his life. Jennie's "Humph!" retired this romance from circulation, he felt. It showed contempt for the idea of his marrying. It relegated him to a sexless category with other defectives, and badged him with the celibacy of a sort of twentieth-century monk, without the honor of the priestly vocation. From another girl it would have been bad enough, but from Jennie Woodruff—and especially on that quiet summer night under the linden—it ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick

... split hairs in this discussion and it may be assumed that I understand that Socialists do not expect to absolutely control all personal activity but would leave all persons free to pursue any vocation which they might desire and to have and hold whatever they may acquire by personal activity and enterprise so only that they make no profit on the work of another or absorb for their own use any gift ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams

... indifference or unkindness to others. In one sense he was a truer philosopher than Cicero: for he seems to have acted through life on that maxim of Socrates which his friend professed to approve, but certainly never followed,—that "a wise man kept out of public business". His vocation was certainly not patriotism; but the worldly wisdom which kept well with men of all political colours, and eschewed the wretched intrigues and bloody feuds of Rome, stands out in no unfavourable contrast with the conduct of many of her soi-disant ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins

... did Hadrian peremptorily 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 of ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... distinct character of its own. It expounds the doctrine of a crucified Christ as applied to social difficulties. What Romans does as a theological treatise, and Galatians as a controversial admonition, and 2 Corinthians as a record of personal experience and vocation, this 1 Corinthians does as an instruction for influencing a corrupt urban life with the leaven of the gospel. It is very practical in tone, and the doctrine which it contains is not stated separately, but is throughout woven into the cords of the apostle's argument. There is nothing in the New ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan

... nobody within sight, and the horse by his manoeuvre plainly intimated what had been the profession of his former master. Instead of passing the chaise, he laid his counter close up to it, and stopped it, having no doubt that his rider would embrace so fair an opportunity of exercising his vocation. The clergyman, under the same mistake, produced his purse unasked, and assured the inoffensive and surprised horseman that it was unnecessary to draw his pistol. The traveller rallied his horse, with apologies to the gentleman, whom ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst

... reflections, these, to add to the pangs of acute gout and the consuming anxieties of seamanship under such circumstances. Dreadful to him, these things, but not dreadful to us; for they show us an Admiral restored to his true temper and vocation, something of the old sea hero breaking out in him at last through all these misfortunes, like the sun through the hurrying clouds of ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... of verse" to the sentiments and the language which formed the staple of the popular thieves' literature of the circulating libraries. The medium chosen was the review of a manuscript, supposed to be sent to the writer by a man who had lived so fully up to his own convictions as to the noble vocation of those who set law at defiance, and lived by picking pockets, burglary, and highway robbery, diversified by an occasional murder, that, with the finisher of the law's assistance, he had ended his exploits in what the slang of his ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun

... Germany, he arrived at Geneva. An old friend, possibly Louis du Tillet, discovered him, and told Farel; and Farel, in sore straits for a helper, besought him, and indeed in the name of the Almighty commanded him, to stay. Calvin was reluctant, for he was reserved and shy, and conceived his vocation to be the scholar's rather than the preacher's; but the entreaties of Farel, half tearful, half minatory, prevailed. And thus Calvin's ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... a fancy to Nick Lang, and possibly he was the only respectable man in all Scranton who did. Perhaps he admired Nick's muscular build, and believed he would make a fine smith, if the husky boy only took a liking to the vocation of hammer and forge ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson

... in ignored Bohemia another fraction; it is composed of young fellows who have been deceived, or have deceived themselves. They mistake a fancy for a vocation, and impelled by a homicidal fatality, they die, some the victims of a perpetual fit of pride, ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger

... I did not entertain any idea that I was going to become a poet. Possibly I thought the trade was a bad one for a second son who must support himself. It is more probable that I instinctively felt that although it was so great a source of joy to me, poetry was not my true vocation. Perhaps, also, I had already begun to note the voice of pessimism raised by the poets of the 'seventies, and to feel that they did not believe in themselves. I distinctly remember that Tennyson's "Is there no hope for modern rhyme?" was often ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... and drove her quite to the other side of the field. He then returned and resumed his book, while Gibbie again sat down near by, and watched both Donal and his charge—the keeper of both herd and cattle. Surely Gibbie had at last found his vocation on Daurside, with both man and ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... service, or he must take up land upon the frontier, stock it, and then defend it until he had won it. He had lived so long the free life of the prairie and the woods, that the crowds of cities and their occupations almost frightened him. For theology he had no vocation and no "call." Medicine he had a most decided repugnance to. Law seemed to him but a meddling in other people's business and predicaments. He felt that he would rather face a band of savages than a constant invasion of shoppers; rather stand behind a breastwork than ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr

... daughter in such an escapade, or so unlike to many another frolic of the brilliant Diva in former days, as to cause any very great surprise to the old singing-master—for such had been the original vocation of Signor Lalli. Yet he seemed on this occasion to be not a little annoyed at what she ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... treasures. While reason and judgment illuminated his mind, my Evellin was the delight and ornament of society; yet still his holier hopes, pursued a good, less transient than the applause of man. If while the faithful servant labours in his vocation a premature night falls upon him and suspends his toil, will the just Master who ordains the privation, be extreme in noting the remissness of infirmity? I once was the happiest of wives, nor can I now be wretched since I still minister ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West

... It is just for sake of the fair internes of the Convent that Drouillon and I have taken up the vocation of statesmen, warriors, philosophers, and friends. We are quite ready to guide your innocent footsteps through the streets of this perilous city, if ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... chandelier suspended from the ceiling, an elderly man, with a long gray beard, and a thin, pale countenance, deeply furrowed with thought rather than care. He received us politely, and then resumed the duties of his vocation. His course of proceeding was to examine the finger nails, and, according to their form, colour, thickness, surface, and grain, to determine the character and destinies of those who consulted him. I was at once pleased and surprised at the minuteness ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker

... provisional arrangements as these could only last till the next annual visit of H.M. Inspector, whose approval was necessary to make them permanent. Having taught for some two years in London, though she had abandoned that vocation of late, Miss Bridehead was not exactly a novice, and Phillotson thought there would be no difficulty in retaining her services, which he already wished to do, though she had only been with him three or four weeks. He had ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy

... "You have missed your vocation," she said, while her eyes narrowed and her upper lip shortened into a delightful smile. "You were born to be a schoolmaster, a veritable pedagogue and terror of illiterate youth. You love to correct. And my rather sketchy English gives ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... religious man, one to whom the Sabbath was in the strictest sense a holy day, a day too sacred to be broken in any fashion whatever, except for some extraordinarily powerful reason. On being asked how it came to pass that he was found thus following his worldly vocation, to the neglect of church-going, he said that in the morning he had seen to the northward so ill-looking a "weather-gaw" that he was convinced a heavy storm was coming, and that probably before morning there would be a dangerous ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang

... hours of unheeded time. 195 years had I sounded these awful warnings, when I was broken by the hands of inconsiderate and unskilful men. In the year 1790, I was cast into the furnace, refounded at London, and returned to my sacred vocation. Reader, thou also shall know a resurrection, may it be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various

... had not been idle. His vocation as gentleman pensioner gave him easy access to any part of the Palace; and the previous day had seen him making himself very agreeable in the apartments of the young Prince, playing with the child, and chatting in a very affable manner ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt

... Prophecy. Just what the vocation of Noah bad been before his call to prepare for the flood we do not know. But after the flood, perhaps compelled by necessity, he became an husbandman. He had probably settled on the slopes or in the valleys of Ararat where he planted a vineyard. On one occasion ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell



Words linked to "Vocation" :   lifework, body, walk, press corps, walk of life, career, business, specialisation, professional life, job, specialty, line, business life, speciality, occupational group, specialization, line of work



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