"Vocation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... facts, as stated 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 ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... aunt, Honor Molloy,—the sister of my mother, who had been dead some years,—pathetically urged me to enter the church, in the hope, as she said, that that would keep me in the right way; but I honestly felt that the church was not my vocation, and that I was much more likely to go the wrong way if I assumed an office for which I was unfit. Then she proposed that I should become a doctor; but I declared that I hated physic, and could never bring myself to drug my fellow-creatures with stuff which I would not take myself. My father ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... most exquisite self-revelations through the Israelitish peasant-soul. And Isaiah of Jerusalem, successful statesman as well as deep seer, still vividly lives for us in some thirty-six chapters of that great collection the 'Book of Isaiah' (i-xii, xv-xx, xxii-xxxix). There is his majestic vocation in about 740 B.C., described by himself, without ambiguity, as a precise, objective revelation (chap. vi); and there is the divinely impressive close of his long and great activity, when he nerves King Hezekiah to refuse ...
— Progress and History • Various
... unless you feel an inward call towards the blessed vocation," replied Aunt Faith reverently; "but why do you delay to come forward and make your open profession of faith? Is it honest, is it ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... of trained and equipped auxiliary forces intelligently to perform it must have ever been apparent. It remained for the World War, conceived, at least in the American mind in unselfish motive, to create and give flesh and blood expression to so Divine a vocation; and assign it honored rank among National institutions eminently to be desired, and, without invidious comparison, devotedly to ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... his first studies with Couture. After having travelled a good deal at sea to obey his parents, his vocation took hold of him irresistibly. About 1850 the young man entered the studio of the severe author of the Romains de la Decadence. His stay was short. He displeased the professor by his uncompromising energy. Couture said of him angrily: ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... the Cathedral Close, she had acquired a taste for what she called "literature," what she innocently believed to be literature. She was of an engaging innocence in this respect; so that typing authors' manuscripts appealed to her as a vocation that combined one of the highest forms of cerebral activity with I don't know ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... this destiny, glittering though it seem; your heart is not in the vocation which ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... considered to be the pursuit of weak-chested youths and eccentric old men: it is seldom regarded as a possible vocation for normal persons of sound health and balanced mind. An athletic and robust young man, clothed in the ordinary costume of a gentleman, will tell a new acquaintance that he is an Egyptologist, whereupon the latter will exclaim in surprise: "Not ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... we personify our new name; but as we give it no distinction of sex, and though it will be active in its vocation, yet we apply to ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... 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 Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... children to England, and to live separate from them for years. Some of these trials missionaries share with their fellow-countrymen, who from secular motives go to foreign lands, but others are peculiar to their vocation. ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... prayse worthy the translation I referre to the skilful, crauing no more prayse, than they shall attribute and giue. To nothing do I aspyre by this my presumption (righte honourable) but cherefull acceptation at your handes: desirous hereby to shew my selfe studious of a frend of so noble vocation. And where greater thinges cannot be done, these small I truste shall not be contempned: which if I doe perceiue, hereafter more ample indeuor shal be imployed to atchieue greater. In these histories (which by another terme I call Nouelles) be described ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... time and labour to Essex's service. Holding him, he says, to be "the fittest instrument to do good to the State, I applied myself to him in a manner which I think rarely happeneth among men; neglecting the Queen's service, mine own fortune, and, in a sort, my vocation, I did nothing but advise and ruminate with myself ... anything that might concern his lordship's honour, fortune, or service." The claim is far too wide. The "Queen's service" had hardly as yet come much in Bacon's way, and he never neglected it when it did come, nor his own fortune ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... complement you would have found the contradiction. He was in the Royal Engineers, and was tall, lean and high- shouldered. He looked every inch a soldier, yet there were people who considered that he had missed his vocation in not becoming a parson. He took a public interest in the spiritual life of the army. Other persons still, on closer observation, would have felt that his most appropriate field was neither the army nor the church, but ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... I suddenly cried out; "what do you want of me? How do you know who I am? Who told you to dry my tears? Is this your vocation and do you think I desire you? I would not touch you with the tip of my finger. What are you doing here? Reply at once. Is it money you want? What price do ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... up myself some day, although my line is far apart from yours. Whether you can do anything that I ask of you or not, I shall be happy then, as I would be now, to do you any just and right service.... Perhaps I have mistaken my vocation. Certainly, if I was back with my rocker on the Tuolumne, I'd make it rattle livelier than ever I did before. I have occasionally thought of London Bridge, but the Thames is now so d—-d cold and dirty, and besides I can swim, and any attempt ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 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 designed for the army, the ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... Addison, and in their degree Steele and his other followers, represent the stage at which the literary organ begins to be influenced by the demands of a new class of readers. Addison feels the dignity of his vocation and has a certain air of gentle condescension, especially when addressing ladies who cannot even translate his mottoes. He is a genuine prophet of what we now describe as Culture, and his exquisite urbanity and delicacy qualify him to be a worthy expositor ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... The almighty dollar rolls before them along the road, and they chase 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 ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... your conclusion will be favorable," remarked Quincy. "In a short time you will be financially independent and freed from any necessity of returning to your former vocation. I never knew of an author so completely successful at the start, and I think you have every encouragement to make literature ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... buildings beyond, the white and green palisade of officers' cottages on either side, and the glitter of a sentry's bayonet, were for a moment intolerable to him. Yet, by a kind of subtle irony, never before had the genius and spirit of the vocation he had chosen seemed to be as incarnate as in the scene before him. Seclusion, self-restraint, cleanliness, regularity, sobriety, the atmosphere of a wholesome life, the austere reserve of a monastery without its mysterious or pensive meditation, ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... he had the greatest respect for that profession, did not feel that 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
... to the country without plan, preparation, or vocation, to make a living. They usually start to build a bungalow but seldom get further than the bungle. Don't build anything without plan. Get a comfortable house proof against cold and heat as soon as possible and, above all, well ventilated. At present the air in the country is good, because ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... broker, a vocation which he practised in Wall Street. Early on the following afternoon, while returning from there, he sat wedged between a gunman and a Hun. He was unconscious of either. The uncertain market; the slump, momentarily ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... little painted glass too, and have got a promise of some old statues, lately dug up, which formerly adorned the cathedral of Litchfield. You see I continue to labour in my vocation, of which I can give you a comical instance:—I remembered a rose in painted glass in a little village going to Ragley, which I remarked passing by five years ago; told Mr. Conway on which hand ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... is portioned out. During the hours of work we tend the sick and visit the dying; we also are employed in other good undertakings, and we hope before long to establish fresh ones. So you see, my dear, that we work out our own salvation, though those who have a vocation to a purely religious life can enter our contemplative order, and devote themselves entirely to prayer and meditation. You will be able to judge by-and-by to which you would wish to belong, though you will, of course, be guided by the advice of ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... time the young orator could not help feeling the power she had to sway great masses of people, and with a thrill of joy she began to believe that perhaps in this work which she loved above anything else in the world she would some day find her vocation, for she was already receiving commendation from men and women of a high order of intelligence and being given larger contributions as a result of ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... he had mistaken his vocation so much as that his vocation had mistaken the canon, for owing to the death of his two elder brothers—one by an accident out hunting, one by drowning at sea when admiral—he had unexpectedly succeeded to the family seat ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... 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 of time. One day Mr. Doman ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... dark-faced chaplain, who, when the Marquess had paused out of breath, tranquilly returned that nothing could make him repent of having brought a soul to Christ, and that, as to the cavaliere Odo, if his maker designed him for a religious, the Pope himself could not cross his vocation. ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... 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 ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... our first idea that the catechist, true to his evangelical vocation, was clothing the naked from his superfluity. Then it came out that Francois was but dealing with his own. The clothes were his, so was the chest, so was the house. Francois was in fact the landlord. Yet you observe he had hung back ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... same time that each ytrap is supplied with its political opinions for the next five years, its leaders—who, I am told, all pursue the vocation of sharpening axes—name a man whom they wish chosen for the office of Tnediserp. He is usually an idiot from birth, the Tamtonians having a great veneration for such, believing them to be divinely inspired. Although few members of the ytrap have ever heard of him before, they at once believe ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... 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 behind a desk and ledger. ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... adoption of which I should be prepared to say to a young man entering life, If you wish to serve the church do it in the sanctuary, and not in parliament (unless he were otherwise determined by his station, and not always then; it must depend upon his inward vocation), and should not think it at all absurd to say the same thing to some who have already placed themselves in this latter sphere. For when the end is attained of letting "the church help herself," and when it is recognised ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... pastor and its own members. The election alone of the congregation was sufficient to bestow the sacerdotal character; and as all essential distinction was denied between the laity and the clergy, no ceremony, no institution, no vocation, no imposition of hands was, as in all other churches, supposed requisite to convey a right to holy orders. The enthusiasm of the Presbyterians led them to reject the authority of prelates, to throw off the restraint of liturgies, to retrench ceremonies, to limit the riches and authority of the priestly ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... were in that car, and on one end of it there was no one, except on the opposite seat, where sat a man about fifty years old, with a most winning face and an elegant eye—a beautiful eye; and I took him from his dress to be a master mechanic, a man who had a vocation. He had with him a very fine little child of about four or five years. I was watching the affection which existed between those two. I judged he was the grandfather, perhaps. It was really a pretty child, and I was admiring her, and as soon ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... isolated slab of chocolate. A corral, two desolate stable-sheds, and the slowly turning windmill were all else. Here Ephraim and one or two helpers abode, armed against Indians, and selling whiskey. Variety in their vocation of drinking and killing was brought them by the travellers. These passed and passed through the glaring vacant months—some days only one ragged fortune-hunter, riding a pony; again by twos and threes, with high-loaded burros; and sometimes they came ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... Letter Ranch. Suspicion of a plot in the affair did not enter his head. To him it was just a sinister stroke of misfortune—one of the chance buffets of fate. One tramp burglar out of the many pursuing that vocation had happened upon the Talpers establishment at a time when its proprietor was in an unusually sound sleep. Bill gave himself over to thoughts of the various forms of punishment he would inflict upon the wandering yeggman in ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... 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
... in his solitary vocation of farmer and hunter, where there were no books, no newspapers, nothing whatever to inform him of what was transpiring in the busy world of civilization, or in the haunts of savage life, two or three hunters came one day to his cabin, where of course they met with a very ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... very safe there for a time—the reverend mothers received her excellently. I do not care for convents, as you know, but I am not sure that Henriette, even at this early age, has not found her vocation. Till to-day, I do not think I had ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... extinct, and imagination govern alone, then the distemper will be madness under the wildest and most fantastic modes. Thus, one of those invalids, perhaps, shall be all sorrow for having been most unjustly deprived of the crown; though his vocation, poor man! be that of a school-master. Another, like Horace's madman, is all joy; and it may seem ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... Explanation of an antique Gem Cat-Pie Legend Authors The Critic The Dilettante and the Critic The Wrangler The Yelpers The Stork's Vocation Celebrity Playing at Priests Songs Poetry A Parable Should e'er the loveless day remain A Plan the Muses entertained The Death of the Fly By the River The Fox and Crane The Fox and Huntsman The Frogs The Wedding Burial ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... rather command—was embraced with 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... proper one should take One's place in the creation; It may be very right to make A choice of some vocation; With such remarks one quite agrees, So sensible they are: I much prefer to take my ease, ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... growing till they became too absurd for the credulity even of party spirit. At last, long after he had been condemned to flannel and chicken broth, a wretched courtesan, who had probably never seen him except in the stage box at the theatre, when she was following her vocation below in a mask, published a lampoon in which she described him as the master of a haram more costly than the Great Turk's. There is, however, reason to believe that there was a small nucleus of truth round which this great mass of fiction gathered, and that the wisdom ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and slain, all appear as in a panorama. The mind becomes entranced, and when sober reflection regains her command, we naturally inquire, Can all this have taken place in my heart? Then the armies of Diabolus, with his thousands of Election Doubters, and as many Vocation Doubters, and his troops of Blood-men—thousands slain, and yet thousands start into existence. And all this in one man! How numberless are our thoughts—how crafty the approaches of the enemy—how hopeless and helpless is the sinner, unless ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... vocation—of course," he cried, "you must see Cerdine!" and, seeing her face fall at this reminder of the change in her prospects, he hastened to set forth his plan. As he did so, he saw how easy it was to explain things to her. She would either accept his suggestion, or ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... absent when the first is present, is the command of language. Many a man knows a great deal but is incapable of transmitting his knowledge. He lacks the gift of expression. He has not cultivated it—for it can be cultivated. The man whose desire or vocation forces him to make the effort to speak will train himself in methods of communication, until he arrives ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... vocation, and began to plan literary occupations for his future life. He purposed a tragedy on the death of Socrates; a story of which, as Tickell remarks, the basis is narrow, and to which I know not how love could have been appended. There would, however, have been no want either of virtue ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... Emerson—once 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, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... that Bessie had been faithful in her work ever since she had realized her vocation. Her lending library books, written with a purpose, were excellent, and were already so much valued by Miss Hacket, that Gillian thought how once she should have felt it a privation not to be allowed to tell her ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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
... philosophers, and classic historians, to become permanently a prey to exaggerated sensibilities, though it was the same temperament fired by a sense of human inequality and wrong, that swept her at last along the road that led to the scaffold. At twenty-six the vocation of the religieuse had lost its fascination; the pious fervor of her childhood had vanished before the skepticism of her intellect, its ardent friendships had grown dim, its fleeting loves had proved illusive, and her romantic dreams ended in a ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... to each corridor, and connected with the hospital is a school for nurses, under the direction of the medical superintendent and the matron. From this school, nurses are provided for the town; they are not merely efficient for any duty in the vocation in which they are always engaged, either within the hospital or out of it, but from the care with which they attend to their own personal cleanliness, and the plan they pursue of changing every garment on leaving an infectious ...
— Hygeia, a City of Health • Benjamin Ward Richardson
... ambitious, or less hasty would be the better word, and had been content to go to sea again, in my simple character of ship-master, and ship-owner; leaving the merchant to those who better understood the vocation. ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... religion. It is terribly alive in the heart of modern England, whether formally believing or unbelieving. Indeed there is the twofold life of puritan and pagan within us all. A recent well-known theologian wrote to his sister: "I am naturally a cannibal, and I find now my true vocation to be in the South Sea Islands, not after your plan, to be Arnold to a troop of savages, but to be one of them, where they are all selfish, lazy, and brutal." It is this universality of paganism which gives ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... again I would have a children's theater and watch it, and work for it, and see it grow and blossom and bear its rich moral and intellectual fruitage; and I should get more pleasure and a saner and healthier profit out of my vocation than I should ever be able to get out of any other, constituted as I am. Yes, you are easily the most fortunate ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... but one; and I owe it to the author, in discharge of a great debt of gratitude, to mention what that was. The sublimer and more passionate poets I still read, as I have said, by snatches, and occasionally. But my proper vocation, as I well know, was the exercise of the analytic understanding. Now, for the most part analytic studies are continuous, and not to be pursued by fits and starts, or fragmentary efforts. Mathematics, for instance, intellectual philosophy, &c, were all become insupportable to me; I shrunk from them ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... one thing. Father H. asked me whether I didn't feel I had a vocation to the Religious Life; he told me that from everything he could see, I had, and that my coming to ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... nature, we shall pass to an entirely different individual, and to another quarter of the place. The spot, to which we wish now to transport the reader, was neither more nor less than the shop of a tailor, who did not disdain to perform the most minute offices of his vocation in his own heedful person. The humble edifice stood at no great distance from the water, in the skirts of the town, and in such a situation as to enable its occupant to look out upon the loveliness of the inner basin, and, through a vista ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... differentiate itself from the ecclesiastical profession, and to become a definite vocation in its various branches. Crowds of students flocked to the seats of learning, and, as travelling scholars, earned a precarious living by begging or "professing" medicine, assisting the illiterate ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... isn't my vocation. I shall start again elsewhere. And Verdun itself, Mademoiselle, can ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... 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
... complete. And incompleteness of any sort leads to trouble. Axel Heyst ought not to have cared for his letters—or whatever it was that brought him out after something more than a year and a half in Samburan. But it was of no use. He had not the hermit's vocation! That was the ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... his inexperience that he 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 wasting ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... he was a painter. The gentlest and most modest of men, the freshest as to his generous appreciation of young aspirants and the frankest and largest hearted as to his peers, incapable of a sordid or ignoble thought, gallantly sustaining the true dignity of his vocation, without one grain of self-ambition, wholesomely natural at the last as at the first, 'in wit a man, simplicity a child,'—no artist of whatsoever denomination, I make bold to say, ever went to his rest ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Virginia and entered upon my new vocation. I was a rusty looking city editor, I am free to confess—coatless, slouch hat, blue woolen shirt, pantaloons stuffed into boot-tops, whiskered half down to the waist, and the universal navy revolver slung to my belt. But I secured a more Christian ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ready pointed and feathered, in freedom of admiration, "and all in the way of business"—then is a lovable sitter to a love-like painter in "parlous" vicinity (as the new school would phrase it) to sweet heart-land! Pleasure in a vocation has no offset in political economy as honor has ("the more honor the less profit"), or portrait-painters would ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... My vocation thus determined, I was bound apprentice; not, however, to a watchmaker, but to an engraver, and I had been so completely humiliated by the contempt of the register, that I submitted without a murmur. My master, whose name was M. Ducommon, was a young man of a very violent and boorish ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Red Duke!" cried Porthos, clapping his hands and nodding his head. "The Red Duke is capital. I'll circulate that saying, be assured, my dear fellow. Who says this Aramis is not a wit? What a misfortune it is you did not follow your first vocation; what a delicious abbe ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and rites of worship are instituted for them. That there was a well-ordered and efficient civil administration admits of no doubt. Whether there existed a thrifty middle class or not we can not decide. The tendency was for the child to follow the vocation of the parent, but there were no rigid barriers of caste. Not until the New Empire, was there an attempt to build up such a ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... that virginity is the greatest of virtues. For Cyprian says (De Virgin. [*De Habitu Virg.]): "We address ourselves now to the virgins. Sublime is their glory, but no less exalted is their vocation. They are a flower of the Church's sowing, the pride and ornament of spiritual grace, the most honored portion of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... horseman, most skilful swordsman, and best shot in the University of Salamanca. His superiority in these respects, his decided character, and agreeable manners, had gained him considerable popularity amongst his fellow-students, who frequently expressed their surprise, that one whose vocation was evidently military should abide by the dusty folios and dry intricacies of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... highlands, he entered on his new vocation with great assiduity; and, supported by an unusually strong constitution, he mapped a larger extent of territory than any other of the numerous surveyors employed on the work. There are yet in the archives of Sweden ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... deities established in their respective temples. The principal streets of the city were adorned with flowers. Indeed, the city was filled with the hum of thousands of voices which resembled the softened roar of distant ocean waves. With dancers all engaged in their vocation, and with the voice of singers, the (Kuru) city then resembled the mansion of Vaisravana himself.[186] Bards and eulogists, O king, accompanied by beautiful women were seen to adorn diverse retired spots in the city. The pennons ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... 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 ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... strongest objection he has to violate his sacred trust arises from the fear that such a revelation would break the heart of an exemplary old Goody Two-Shoes, for whom he has all his life long cherished a youthful love, the thought of which, and not his supernatural vocation, has sustained him, so I understood him to say, throughout his priestly career. All very pretty and "pale young Curatey," and theatrically sentimental, but don't put this man forward as the self-sacrificing hero of a Melodrama. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... wild mules, which were very numerous in that section of country along the Nueces River, we thought we would join the party and see how much success they were having, and observe the methods employed in this laborious and sometimes dangerous vocation. With this object in view, we continued on until we found it necessary to cross to the other side of the creek to reach the point indicated by the smoke. Just before reaching the crossing I discovered moccasin tracks near the water's edge, and realizing in an instant ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... papers were unremoved, if he had returned after it, would have found the Duke seated in his still warm chair, issuing directions to Phillips, the under-secretary, while Macdonald, Duncannon's private secretary, was still at his vocation in the adjoining room. Pretty much the same thing he did in the other three offices. He has fixed his head-quarters at the Home Office, and occasionally roves over the rest. All this is unavoidable under ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... a 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 ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... Journalism's as good as anything, and in some ways, it's a lot better than most things, and let me tell you, Mac, anybody can make a decent living out of newspapers if he only takes the trouble to earn it. Half the fellows in Fleet Street treat journalism as if it were a religious vocation, and they lie about in pubs all day waiting for the Holy Ghost to come down and inspire them ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... an employee, and makes the crudest advances to him, believing that she is thus executing the will of Jesus. 'Necessity makes laws,' she exclaims to him, 'the moments are pressing, I have been waiting too long.' She still speaks of her religious vocation which might be compromised by so long a delay. 'I do not want to get married.' Gradually a transformation took place; the love of God was effaced and earthly love became more intense than ever. 'Quitting the heights in which I wished to soar, I am coming so near to earth ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... often has asked me if I could not find A place somewhere near me that suited her mind; I know but a single one vacant, which she, With her rare talent that way, would fit to a T. And it would not imply any pause or cessation 1200 In the work she esteems her peculiar vocation,— She may enter on duty to-day, if she chooses, And remain Tiring-woman ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... killed what the inclemencies of blind chance would have spared. We find accordingly that few Fredericks or Napoleons, indeed none since the Great Alexander, who unfortunately drank himself to death too soon for proving what lay in him, were nursed up with an eye to their vocation; mostly with an eye quite the other way, in the midst of isolation and pain, destitution and contradiction. Nay, in our own times, have we not seen two men of genius, a Byron and a Burns: they both, by mandate ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... interruption altogether unexpected, marvellous, tragical. Their hands were still joined, he had turned slightly towards her so that his eyes looked into hers, they were face to face with one of those psychological crises which, since the days of primitiveness, have made man's destiny and woman's vocation. Ever afterwards a thought of that moment brought thrilling recollections—there was the suspense, the footstep outside, the crashing of a pistol shot through the glass. Douglas leaped to his feet with a cry of horror. Emily ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... that a real love and faculty for science are born in a man, and that to the man of scientific capacity rules of procedure are unnecessary; his own intuition is sufficient, or he has mistaken his vocation,—but that is not my point. It is not that Bacon's methods are useless because the best men do not need them; if they had been founded on a careful study of the methods actually employed, though it might be unconsciously employed, by scientific men—as the methods of induction, stated ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... with clenched fist, he stood seeming about to spring upon me; "I admit no such right, especially of an Englishman. The English have ever been my most implacable enemies. Because, forsooth, I choose to earn my living by following a vocation of which some of them disapprove, they must needs do their utmost to ruin me, and by heaven they have very nearly succeeded, too! Who are they that they should presume to thrust their opinions down the throats ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... participation in the exercises of worship and instruction in the Christian assemblies of Corinth. This judgment is accepted, by those who hold to the unreal Bible, as forclosing the case of woman versus man in the vocation of the ministry, in this land and age as in all lands and ages. We saw lately the action of this theory over in Brooklyn. Though she had the gifts and graces of a Lucretia Mott, though her preaching were ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... roared I, struggling; but he only held me the faster. I tussled with the man until my coat and shirt were torn, but in vain; the crowd now assembled, and I was fast. The fact was, that a pickpocket had been exercising his vocation at the time that I was running past, and from my haste, and loss of my hat, I was supposed to be the criminal. The police took charge of me—I pleaded innocence in vain, and I was dragged before the magistrate, at Marlborough Street. My appearance, the disorder of my dress, my coat and shirt in ribbons, ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... born with a predominant instinct, with some vocation or some desire which has been evoked as soon as they begin to ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... too early, it seems, to find you at your vocation. But how are you going to dispose of ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... the arrival of J. B. Hobson's letter, I no more dreamed of chasing the unicorn than of trying for the Northwest Passage. Three seconds after reading this letter from the honorable Secretary of the Navy, I understood at last that my true vocation, my sole purpose in life, was to hunt down this disturbing monster and rid the world ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... difference between a French and an English dandy: the first is an impertinent, affected coxcomb, who makes love to every woman as a matter of course—it is his vocation. The second is a cold, contemptuous, conceited creature, intrenched in a double armour of selfishness, ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... acid; the diver also carries a supply of compressed oxygen from which to add to the remaining nitrogen oxygen, in substitution for that which has been burnt up in the process of respiration. Armed with this apparatus, a diver is enabled to follow his vocation without any air-tube connecting with the surface, indeed without any connections whatever. A notable instance of a most courageous use of this apparatus was afforded by a diver named Lambert, who, during one of the inundations ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... years' catering for popular taste, he was no nearer emerging from obscurity than he had been at the commencement. It was discouraging and humiliating; he had started with such confidence and boasting. Now those who had spoken against his literary vocation seemed to be justified, and those who had been most inclined to ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... Wood. I have no vocation to it, Gervase: A man of sense is not made for marriage; 'tis a game, which none but dull plodding fellows can play at well; and 'tis as natural to them, as crimp is to ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... She had none of the proud appearances of the metaphysical mind; she did not, so far as we 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 ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... the biographers of Mohammed, and many 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 of Mohammed, ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... every body here appears to esteem it a condescension for her to open the Exhibition as though it were a Parliament, and with far more of personal exertion and heartiness on her part. And while I must regard her vocation as one rather behind the intelligence of this age and likely to go out of fashion at no distant day, yet I am sure that change will not come through her fault. I was glad to see her in the pageant to-day, and hope she enjoyed it ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... dumps to-night. Been a burglar at family mansion in Regent's Park; the Firm at dinner; SONS standing a little meal for ANTONY; burglar took opportunity of entering by bedroom window, first observing precaution of screwing up doors, and other entrances and exits, so that he might pursue his vocation with that certainty of non-disturbance upon which all well-bred burglars insist. Loot considerable, Providence blessing the burglar with tea-pots and spoons to extent that would have excited envy in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... wearing out such citizens as seek legal redress for some of the many outrageous acts of oppression practised by the corporations. Once the government was in control, these lawyers would be relegated to some employment where they would do less harm, even if not engaged in a more honorable vocation than that of trying to defeat justice by the use of such questionable means as the control of the vast revenues of the corporations place in ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various |
