"Vocation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ranks of society. Nevertheless, desultory as his labours, fragmentary as his productions at present may seem to the cursory observer—my undoubting belief is, that in the end it will be found that Coleridge did, in his vocation, the day's work of a giant. He has been melted into the very heart of the rising literatures of England and America; and the principles he has taught are the master-light of the moral and intellectual being of men, who, if they shall fail to save, will assuredly illustrate and condemn, ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... years," continued the Spaniard, "since I took up my real vocation in the world. Previous to that time, I believed myself made for domestic life, and indulged in those absurd dreams of love natural to young hearts. An illusion soon destroyed—an evil hour—an accident ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... been very diligent in my vocation; but you have so drained all the French plays and romances, that they are not able to supply you with words ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... reader of your valuable paper and find in it much to interest, and many practical hints that are useful in my vocation; I would not be without it for any consideration and I think every mechanic in the land should take it, read it, and profit by ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... to me to entreat a favour of you before I close my letter. When, in your precepts to youth, you arrive at the chapter and age which treats of the choice of a profession, I implore you to insert something to this effect: "If your vocation leads you to be a publisher or editor of any work, moral, political, or historical, it matters not which, do not consider yourself at liberty to mutilate an author without his previous knowledge, and above all, one who is tenacious ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... man has written as many volumes with so few sentences that can be quoted." Winged words were not his vocation; nothing urged him that way: the great mystery of existence was not great to him; did not drive him into rocky solitudes to wrestle with it for an answer, to be answered or to perish. He had nothing of the martyr; into no ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... marry, and there are three millions who earn their own living. It is there contended that all effort is improper which is directed toward making celibacy easy for women, and that marriage, their only true vocation, should be promoted at any cost, even at that of distributing through the colonies England's half million of unmarried ones. Some declare that it is impossible to make the labor of single women remunerative, or their lives free and happy. But if the occupations of women were raised ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... and most selfish life is the life of the people who have joined together only in order to enjoy life; and the highest vocation in the world is that of those who live in order to serve God by bringing good into the world, and who have joined together for that very purpose. Don't mistake half-measures for the real thing. Why should a ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... Aye, so it seems, and so it is to you; You are a patriot, a plebeian Gracchus—[ea] The rebel's oracle, the people's tribune— I blame you not—you act in your vocation;[430] They smote you, and oppressed you, and despised you; So they have me: but you ne'er spake with them; You never broke their bread, nor shared their salt; You never had their wine-cup at your lips: 460 You grew not up with them, nor laughed, nor ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... the various details of service, it might be a good moment to speak of the unreasoning indignity cast upon the honorable vocation of ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... their vocation to cultivate a spirit of artless happiness in the school, the Mystic Seven set to work on Veronica. She did not respond to their efforts; on the contrary, she seemed to resent them. When they attempted to introduce lighter veins of conversation, she reproached ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... the revenues of the idol to which they were attached. They dance before him daily and sing hymns in his honor. The ranks of the nautch girls are sometimes recruited by the purchase of children from poor parents, and by the dedication of the daughters of pious Hindu families to that vocation, just as in Christian countries daughters are consecrated to the vocation of religion from the cradle and sons are dedicated to the priesthood and ministry. Indeed it is considered a high honor for the daughter of a Hindu family to be received into ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... glad to hear that," was the admiral's reply, "for I have a suggestion to make which I trust may meet with your approval. I suppose I may take it for granted that you are open to an offer of employment in your own vocation?" ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... communication and of transportation, which enables individuals to distribute their attention and to live at the same time in several different worlds, tends to destroy the permanency and intimacy of the neighborhood. Further than that, where individuals of the same race or of the same vocation live together in segregated groups, neighborhood sentiment tends to fuse together with racial ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... civilized societies. Of the way in which the position was attained in the earliest times we have no information, but in relatively low tribes it appears that it is attained in various ways. There is sometimes a suggestion of vocation in a dream or a vision.[1558] Among some tribes a candidate for the office has to undergo a process of education, that is, of training in the signs by which the presence of superhuman Powers is recognizable and of the way of dealing with disease and other evils.[1559] It is not unusual that ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... with the unfaltering energy which ever characterized her undertakings. Yielding to conscientious scruples, she refused the assistance kindly offered by the surrounding community, and having chosen a vocation, assiduously applied herself to the accomplishment of her cherished purpose. Ere long, she had heaped together an amount of money sufficiently large to purchase the comfortable ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... urgent wants might be found in some inhabitant of this house. I needed at present a few cents; and what were a few cents to the tenant of a mansion like this? I had an invincible aversion to the calling of a beggar, but I regarded with still more antipathy the vocation of a thief; to this alternative, however, I was now reduced. I must either steal or beg; unless, indeed, assistance could be procured under the notion of a loan. Would a stranger refuse to lend the pittance that I wanted? Surely not, when the urgency ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... lucrative practice, and with all the attractions of wealth and of fame before him, and in a quiet, lovely and elegant home, with a wife who has ever been as a guardian angel to his pathway, was led to change his vocation to that of a wandering Evangelist, and how it is that he now stands before the world beside Knapp, and Earle, and Moody, and other world-renowned Evangelists of the 19th century, in leading multitudes ...
— There is No Harm in Dancing • W. E. Penn
... warfare; believing that the gifts of the Spirit ought never to be paid with money. They appointed committees to visit the sick, the afflicted, and the destitute, and to superintend marriages and funerals. The farmer, the shoemaker, the physician, or the merchant, followed his vocation diligently, and whenever the Spirit moved him to exhort his brethren, he did so. The "First, and Fifth Day" of the week, called by other denominations Sunday and Thursday, were set apart by them for religious meetings. Women were placed on an equality ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... destroy the works, which he did, and brought off his men successfully. He had, before that, been commander of the Rattlesnake sloop of war, and had much annoyed the British trade; Being bred a seaman, he has returned to that vocation. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... sparkling lakes, and perhaps to tell her stories of the wilds when the smoke of the camp-fire drifted by and the cry of the loon came out of the shadows. For all that, there was not much risk of his falling in love with her. He was not a sentimentalist, and she had told him that her vocation was science. Her journey was a duty, and when the duty was carried out she would concentrate on her studies, and as she had talent presently make her mark. He did not think she would find the lode, but ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... a week the insurance agent plied his vocation assiduously but fruitlessly. The farmers and the citizens of Tinkletown were slow to take up insurance. They would talk crops and politics with the obliging Mr. Gregory, but that was all. And yet, his ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... Bob had become fully convinced that he was his father's son, and that mining engineering would be vastly more to his liking. It was a profession, however, upon which his father frowned. Like most men who have made a failure of their vocation, he dreaded to see his son follow in his father's footsteps. He was insistent upon Bob following the law; so to please him young Bob had managed to struggle through the course and by dint of much groaning and burning of midnight oil, eventually he was admitted to practice ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... sister, Hannah, came to live with him and keep house, and eventually they both got married, Joseph to a young woman of the place, and Hannah to a small working farmer whose farm was about a mile from the village. Children were born to both, and in time grew up, Joseph's sons following their father's vocation, while Hannah's were brought up to work on the farm. And some of them, too, got married in time and had ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... be very quick to recognise her exceptional piety, and her gift of beholding things invisible to the majority of Christians. They engaged her in conversations, which, had they been preserved, would doubtless present to us one of the sources whence she derived inspiration for her marvellous vocation. One among them, whose name will never be known, raised up an angelic deliverer for the king and the kingdom ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... business, n. vocation, calling, pursuit, craft, trade, occupation, profession; avocation; traffic, trade, commerce, enterprise, industry, barter; duty, function, work, place; affair, concern, matter. Associated words: commercial, mercantile, technical, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... further quickened by a consciousness trained to an equally nimble power of movement, individualism, the capacities, the claim, of the individual, forced into their utmost play by a ready sense and dexterous appliance of opportunity,—herein, certainly, lay at least one half of their vocation in history. The material conformation of Greece, a land of islands and peninsulas, with a range of sea-coast immense as compared with its area, and broken up by repellent lines of mountain this way and that, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... that he was a man of very considerable intellectual and physical force, but also of most irregular tendencies, which in his later years debased him to serious immoralities. He was a superior workman, discontented with his lot. He sought to better it by speculative operations outside his vocation. As his daughter expresses it, "he went in pursuit of riches, and met with ruin on his way." She also remarks of him, "that he could not be said to be a good man, but he had a great deal of what ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... pocket hunter by first intention. He must be born with the faculty, and along comes the occasion, like the tap on the test tube that induces crystallization. My friend had been several things of no moment until he struck a thousand-dollar pocket in the Lee District and came into his vocation. A pocket, you must know, is a small body of rich ore occurring by itself, or in a vein of poorer stuff. Nearly every mineral ledge contains such, if only one has the luck to hit upon them without too much labor. The sensible thing for a man ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... master-mind on his was that of a spark on tinder. Under the flash, he cursed for the hundredth time the folly he had been guilty of in throwing up medicine. It was a vocation that had fitted him as coursing fits a hound, or house-wifery a woman. The only excuse he could find for his apostasy was that he had been caught in an epidemic of unrest, which had swept through the country, upsetting the balance of men's reason. He ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... but the distinguishing features of both categories are fairly well marked. The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that's their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... moralities," said Jennie; "they are only to be taken as the invariable bay-leaf which Professor Blot introduces into all his recipes for soups and stews,—a little elegant bitterness, to be kept tastefully in the background. You see now, papa, I should like the vocation of being beautiful. It would just suit me to wear point-lace and jewelry, and to have life revolve round me, as some beautiful star, and feel that I had nothing to do but shine and refresh the spirits of all gazers, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... of Edwin, the first Christian King of Northumbria and had been baptised with her uncle at York in 627 by the Roman Missionary Paulinus.[21] Bede says that, before consecrating her life to religion, "she had lived thirty-three years very nobly among her family." When she realised her vocation, she went into East Anglia where her brother-in-law was king, intending to cross over to the continent and take the veil at Chelles. She spent a year here in preparation, but before she could accomplish her purpose, Bishop Aidan invited her to the north, ...
— Early Double Monasteries - A Paper read before the Heretics' Society on December 6th, 1914 • Constance Stoney
... would remain with him through life; and in his eyes the calling of a life saver must always be reckoned the noblest vocation to which a young man could ...
— Darry the Life Saver - The Heroes of the Coast • Frank V. Webster
... rights officials, the past attitudes and practices of the services, especially the treatment of Negroes during World War II, had created among black opinion-makers an indifference toward the services as a vocation.[22-40] Lacking encouragement from parents, teachers, and peers, black youths were increasingly reluctant to consider a military career. For their part the services tried to counter this attitude with an energetic public relations program.[22-41] Encouraged by the department's civil rights ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... the majority of decent average conscientious men of business (men with aspirations and ideals) do not as a rule go home of a night genuinely tired. I remain convinced that they put not as much but as little of themselves as they conscientiously can into the earning of a livelihood, and that their vocation bores ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... in life can be assured; but only if you supplement your qualifications and make everything you do most effective by using continually, whatever your vocation, the art of salesmanship. ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... strange to the former habits of his adopted 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
... a modern biographer would speak of a gentleman's successful railroad speculations, his taking shares in a coal mine, or coming into a "nice little thing in the Long Annuities." Nevertheless, there is something significant of his future vocation, in a speech which Olaf makes to his assembled friends and relations, imparting to them his design of endeavouring to regain possession of the throne: "I and my men have nothing for our support save what we captured in war, FOR WHICH WE HAVE HAZARDED BOTH LIFE AND SOUL; for many an ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... and grim death, make her keenly alive to their wants and feelings. No one has such power over the poor untutored heathen children of the ragged school as she has, and no one loves them as she does. She, too, like her mistress, has found her vocation in their city home; who cannot find a vocation in any home, if they will only look ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... his statement, honest, earnest, final. No, he was not playing at story-telling, though it must have given him pleasure; nor was his object merely to delight somebody, though he certainly has delighted many by his song. He was the true Poet, upholding his own worth and that of his vocation; he was loyal to the Muse whose word he must sing whether it find listeners or not. Homer built his legendary structure to live in, not to play in; with all his sportiveness, he is a deeply earnest man; if his Zeus sometimes takes on a comic mask, it is because Providence is ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... a "sensitive." That is a new vocation struck out by the prolific ingenuity of the female mind. Commonplace doctors would simply call her "hysterical;" but she calls herself magnetic. She is stout and inclined to a large appetite, particularly affecting ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... crime. "Vae victis!" as Brennus said when he threw his sword into the scale,—Woe to the conquered! The negro is weaker in intellect than his "born lord," the white man, and has no right to choose his own vocation. Let the latter do it for him, and, if need be, return to the "beneficent whip." "On the side of the oppressor there is power;" let him use it without mercy, and hold flesh and blood to the grindstone with unrelenting rigor. Humanity is squeamishness; pity for the suffering mere "rose-pink sentimentalism," ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Giraud (arranged for the stage by others), La Maratre and Mercadet le faiseur, the last of which has, since his death, been not unsuccessful. But on the whole he did devote himself to his true vocation, with a furious energy beside which even Scott's, except in his sadder and later days, becomes leisurely. Balzac generally wrote (dining early and lightly, and sleeping for some hours immediately after dinner) from midnight till any hour in the following day—stretches of sixteen hours being ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... notable individuals in the plot was a certain Jack Purcell, commonly called Gullah Jack,—Gullah signifying Angola, the place of his origin. A conjurer by profession and by lineal heritage in his own country, he had resumed the practice of his vocation on this side the Atlantic. For fifteen years he had wielded in secret an immense influence among a sable constituency in Charleston; and as he had the reputation of being invulnerable, and of teaching invulnerability as an art, he ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... 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 ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... friend to 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 ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... of such a thing, became the artisan of his son's religious vocation. The tales which he brought home from his travels seemed at first, perhaps, not to have aroused the child's attention, but they were like germs a long time buried, which suddenly, under a warm ray of sunlight, ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... was the firm, though Gruff had been bought out long ago; only leaving his name, and as some said his nature, according to its Dictionary meaning, in the business—Tackleton the Toy-merchant, was a man whose vocation had been quite misunderstood by his Parents and Guardians. If they had made him a Money Lender, or a sharp Attorney, or a Sheriff's Officer, or a Broker, he might have sown his discontented oats in his youth, and, after having had the full run ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... were unmistakable as to vocation, being lavishly painted, strident, and bold, and significantly dressed. I saw several in amazing costumes of tightly fitting black like ballet girls, low necked, short skirted, around the smooth waists snake-skin belts supporting handsome little pistols and dainty poignards. ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... is unintelligent even there. Of all authors whom a modern may still read, and read over again with pleasure, he has perhaps the least to say. His poems seem to bear testimony rather to the fashion of rhyming, which distinguished the age, than to any special vocation in the man himself. Some of them are drawing-room exercises, and the rest seem made by habit. Great writers are struck with something in nature or society, with which they become pregnant and longing; they are possessed with an idea, and cannot be at peace until they ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... so to say, and with a certain royally suppressed surprise that Heaven should be merciful. On the whole, considering the circumstances, she admitted that Maria Addolorata had accepted the veil with sufficient outward grace, though without any vocation, and she took it for granted that with such opportunities the girl must slowly develop into an abbess not unlike her predecessors. She prayed regularly, of course, and with especial intention, for her niece, as for the welfare of the order, and assumed as an unquestionable result that ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... him what Julian had told me: about trying to get on the stage, and not succeeding, and realizing that she couldn't act; feeling that there was no vocation, no place for her anywhere. To comfort the girl, Brian opened the gate of his garden of the blind, and gave her its secrets, as he has given them to me. He explained to her his trick of "seeing across ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... possession of this manuscript, I was reconciled to the means of life. I left the mountain, and, traversing the wilderness, stopped in Chetasco. That kind of employment which I sought was instantly procured; but my new vocation was scarcely assumed when a band of savages ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... des filles de joie, attending our court, the sum of forty-five livres tournois, making the value of twenty ecus of gold sol at forty-five sols apiece, of which we have made and do make by these presents donation, as much for her as for the other women and girls of her vocation, to divide among themselves as they may advise, and this for their right for the month ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... preserved an attachment to a lady whom he knew before his marriage, whose society he never ceased to frequent, and who finally died in his arms in 1793. Madame d'Houdetot found consolation in the friendship of Saint Lambert. "We both of us," said her husband, "both Madame d'Houdetot and I, had a vocation for fidelity, only there was a mis-arrangement." She occasionally composed verses of more than ordinary point, but she had good sense enough not to write them down, nor to set up on the strength of them for poetess and wit.[271] Her talk ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... in the Metropolitan Museum is a brilliant and altogether remarkable little picture by John Sargent, entitled "The Hermit" (Pl. 21). Mr. Sargent is a portrait-painter by vocation, and the public knows him best as a penetrating and sometimes cruel reader of human character. He is a mural painter by avocation and capable, on occasion, of a monumental formality. In this picture, as in the wonderful collection of watercolors in the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... the mobile, smiling mouth of the picture, but his chin was deeper and squarer, 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 and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... England and France were interminable; and so were the wars between France and other nations. There were civil wars and religious wars and wars of succession; seven-years wars and thirty-years wars and hundred-years wars. War was the regular vocation of nations, the profession of arms the chief profession, peace merely an occasional respite, in no sense to be reckoned on or presumed to endure as the natural condition ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... first words the canon said to his friend when they met for their walk on the Mail referred usually to the succulent dinner he had just eaten; and it was a very rare thing if during the walks of each week he did not say at least fourteen times, "That excellent spinster certainly has a vocation ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... them. The elder had long been a spiritual guide to the younger: she had led her mind in the direction of the cloister, and now rejoiced sincerely that God had smoothed away the family difficulties and pecuniary embarrassments which for some time had stood in the way of her vocation. Still, natural affection was not stifled in the generous, unselfish heart of the cloistered nun, and she wept with her sister at the thought that, though the walls of the same city would hold them both till death, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... protecting the fruit, whether they served their purpose well or not, struck me as being very unworthy of the times we lived in, and seemed to show that the British fruit-growers, who were ahead of the world in all other matters connected with their vocation, had quite neglected this one point. A thousand years ago cultivators of the soil were scaring the birds from their crops just as we are doing, with methods no better and no worse, putting up scarecrows and old ragged garments and fluttering rags, hanging a dead crow to a stick to warn the others ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... said Miss Burton, "may answer very well for the wise and fortunate, for those whose lives are as yet unspoiled and unblighted by themselves or others. But even an artist, who by his vocation gives his attention to the beautiful, must nevertheless see that there are many in the world who are neither wise nor fortunate—who seem predestined by their circumstances, folly, and defective natures to blunder and sin till they reach a point where reason and intelligence ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... horses and themselves from undue fatigue when possible, never killed a man when they could avoid killing him, bore themselves quietly, didn't know the meaning of Romance, but were strong for utility, and withal worked as hard and suffered as much in becoming proficient in their vocation as the veriest artisan of the cities. Circumstances, hazard, untoward event, even inclination toward excitement, made some of these men heroes, but never in their own eyes. There were exceptions, of course, but most of the exceptions ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... I ask thy aid, To give my arms the blooming maid, I will not, though the nation all, Proclaim thee (like a gracless imp) A vile old good-for-nothing pimp, But say, "'Tis thy vocation, Hal." ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... its thematic vagueness, its rhythmic swiftness and splendour of tonalities. In vain. No picture can spell many moods simultaneously, nor paint soul-states successively within one frame. These painters have mistaken their vocation. They should have been musicians or writers, or handle the more satisfactory, if less ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... confirmed in 1868. Louis Kossuth admitted its extraterritorial character when he said that, even though the Magyar tongue should be enforced elsewhere as the medium of official communication, he considered that an exception "should be made in favor of a maritime city whose vocation was to welcome all nations led thither ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... spoke of it as torture, it was a proof of his indomitable spirit that during his last decade he achieved his most memorable triumphs; and yet, in the height of his powers, his youthful dread returned to him, and he expressed a doubt whether he had not mistaken his vocation. The encouragement of Goethe went far to sustain him; between these two great poets existed a warm friendship, and Goethe showed his confidence in Schiller by asking him to correct "Egmont" for the stage. But still he desponded, and it ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... the chap-book, was contingent upon precisely this recognition of brotherhood with, and practice of willing service towards, all maimed and sorrowful creatures. His America was here or nowhere, his vocation clearly indicated, his work immediate ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... must have been late in 1856. His delightful sketch "How I Went to the Mines" is surely autobiographical. He says: "I had been two years in California before I ever thought of going to the mines, and my initiation into the vocation of gold-digging was partly compulsory." He refers to "the little pioneer settlement school, of which I was the somewhat youthful, and, I fear, not over-competent master." What he did after the school-teaching episode he does not record. He was a stage messenger ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... could have seemed more unlikely than such a career. Cleveland's ambitions were bound up in his profession and his politics were opposed to those of the powers holding local control. But the one circumstance did not shut him out of political vocation and the other became a positive advantage. He entered public life in 1863 through an unsought appointment as assistant district attorney for Erie County. The incumbent of the office was in poor health and needed an assistant on whom he could rely ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... fateful night obeyed the yearning of her woman's heart and not the demands of the vocation which placed her far above all other women, he would long since have clasped her in his arms, as quiet Reuben embraced his poor, feeble Milcah, now so joyous as she ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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 ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... servants told her he was away. She confided these things, leaning in Charlie's arms on a little striped divan by a gas fire. She made him a drink, and showed him the cunning and luxurious little contrivances for comfort about the flat. He loved it. She didn't try to conceal from him her real vocation, for that would have been too silly. Even Charlie might not have been such a fool as to believe her. But she invested it with glamour; she made of it romance. Once more as in boyhood he saw the world full ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... a-boasting of thy drunken discoveries," said the Thane. "Thou shalt wish thou hadst not gotten thee so soon from the fiend's clutches. A spice of old Nicholas' vocation may not be amiss; yet, by way of relish ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... him with their first child; the family fell into want; Mrs. Hopper (squeezed between door and jamb) drew her master's attention to the lamentable case, and help was of course forthcoming. Then, by good luck, Allchin was enabled to resume his vocation; he got a place at a grocer's in Fulham Road, and in a few weeks presented himself before his benefactor, bringing half-a-crown as a first instalment toward the discharge of his debt; for only on this condition had he accepted ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... years ago. 'What! put my boy in Grub Street? I would rather see him in his coffin.' In his mind's eye he beholds Savage on his bunk and Chatterton on his deathbed. He does not know that there are many hundreds of persons of both sexes who have found out this vocation for themselves, and are diligently pursuing it—under circumstances of quite unnecessary difficulty—to their material advantage. He is unaware that the conditions of literature in England have been as completely changed within ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... workingman has no chance to realize life through his vocation. We easily recognize the historic association in regard to ancient buildings. We say that "generation after generation have stamped their mark upon them, have recorded their thoughts in them, until they have become the property of all." And yet this is even more true of the instruments of ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... of his career, a destroyer. He roamed over the world to interrupt commerce, to break in upon and disturb the peaceful pursuits of industry, to batter down city walls, and burn dwellings, and kill men. This is the true vocation of a hero and a conqueror; but at the mouth of the Nile Alexander laid aside this character. He turned his energies to the work of planning means to do good. He constructed a port; he built warehouses; he provided accommodations and protection for merchants and ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... sure how one would feel in certain circumstances; to make sure, he must come as near trying it as his means permit. And so here is young heroism with a wooden sword, and mothers practise their kind vocation over a bit of jointed stick. It may be laughable enough just now; but it is these same people and these same thoughts, that not long hence, when they are on the theatre of life, will make you weep and tremble. For children think very much the same thoughts ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ashes of paper. The lid of his trunk stood open, and the large upper tray, which she remembered to have seen full of papers and note-books, was empty. And somehow she understood that Bibbs had given up the mysterious vocation he had hoped to follow—and that he had given it up for ever. She thought it was the wisest thing he could have done—and yet, for an unknown reason, she sat upon the bed and wept a little before ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... except enough to keep them a week, when sober, and a commission for doing the business, for which I was careful to look out. An individual who bore the name of "One Eye Jack" boarded with us and I could always depend upon him in time of trouble. His vocation for a long time was a mystery, until one evening, as I was passing down a side street, he popped out from an alley and with uplifted blackjack would have felled and robbed me had he not recognized the unearthly yell I gave. I forgave ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... 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
... to devote himself chiefly to the educational work, which, in one form or another, has perhaps always been the most absorbing interest of his life. When he was a professor at the Ferguson College teaching was with him a vocation rather than a profession, and, if one may judge by his practice, he believes that only those who are prepared to set an example of selflessness and almost ascetic simplicity of life can hope to promote the moral and social as well as the political advancement of India. ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... pails of water then, Let the maids bewash the men; Give St. Distaff all the right, Then bid Christmas sport good night; And next morrow, every one To his own vocation."{58} ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... unions, have proved incapable, in person of their leaders, to understand, much less to carry out the task which the new epoch presents to them. The proletariat has created a new institution which embraces the entire working class without distinction of vocation or political maturity, an elastic form of organization capable of continually renewing itself, expanding, and of drawing into itself ever new elements, ready to open its doors to the working groups of city and village which are near to the ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... of men whose hearts glow with that generous ardor, the noble product of difficult times. Into their hearts flows wisdom from on high,—thoughts great, magnanimous, brotherly. They may not all remain true to this high vocation, but, at any rate, they will have lived a period of true life. I knew some of these men when in Lombardy; of old aristocratic families, with all the refinement of inheritance and education, they are thoroughly pervaded by principles of a genuine democracy of brotherhood and justice. In the ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... to the summit of fame on the shoulders of my long experience. You may enter into partnership at once, by keeping the books in the morning and going out to visit patients in the afternoon. While I dose the nobility and clergy, you shall labor in your vocation among the lower orders; and when you have felt your ground a little, I will get you admitted into our body. You are a philosopher, Gil Blas, tho you have never graduated; the common herd of them, tho they have graduated in due form ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... expatiated upon the total lack of taste among the inhabitants! In dealing with the trade, revenue, and other administrative details Smollett shows himself the expert compiler and statistician a London journalist in large practice credits himself with becoming by the mere exercise of his vocation. In dealing with the patois of the country he reveals the curiosity of the trained scholar and linguist. Climate had always been one of his hobbies, and on learning that none of the local practitioners was in a position to exact a larger fee than ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... 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 by some sketches of birds and leaves he showed them, ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... insisting that it is corrupt and bad for men in office to take part in politics, are striving now to prove that the Republican party has been unclean and vicious all its life.... Some of these worthies masquerade as reformers. Their vocation and ministry is to lament the sins of other people. Their stock in trade is rancid, canting self-righteousness. They are wolves in sheep's clothing. Their real object is office and plunder. When Dr. ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... things that mark the man of genius. It needed a man of genius and of Hawthorne's imaginative delicacy, to feel the propriety of such a figure as Hilda's and to perceive the relief it would both give and borrow. This pure and somewhat rigid New England girl, following the vocation of a copyist of pictures in Rome, unacquainted with evil and untouched by impurity, has been accidentally the witness, unknown and unsuspected, of the dark deed by which her friends, Miriam and Donatello, are knit together. This is her revelation of evil, her loss of perfect innocence. She ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... pension of fifteen hundred pounds a year. His friends palliated this relinquishment, of which both friends and enemies knew the true reason, with an account of declining health, and the necessity of recess and quiet. He now returned to his 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 ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... courage, seamanship, and a natural aptitude for keeping riotous spirits in subjection were concerned, no man was better qualified for his vocation than John Jermin. He was the very beau-ideal of the efficient race of short, thick-set men. His hair curled in little rings of iron gray all over his round bullet head. As for his countenance, it was strongly marked, deeply ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... and serious question as to just what the position of woman was in society; what God meant by her creation, what was her place. There are some men who think the highest ambition of woman is the wash-tub; that when she finds her vocation there she has fulfilled her mission, and when God has prepared a place for her in the Kingdom of Heaven, He takes her home, and gives her a diploma. There are others who have an idea that the place for woman is a little higher up; that she is to bask in the sunshine of life—that she is ...
— Silver Links • Various
... 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 she sits in ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... to-day? There had been scarcely a breach of the law of Nature by women, and not one that men were not chiefly to blame for. Men tempted them by love of dress, of ease, of money, and of fame, to forget their proper vocation; but every true woman came right in the end, and preferred to the false and fictitious labour for worldly glory, a mother's silent and unseen devotion, counting it no virtue at all. "Yes, women, mothers, girls, in your hands lies the salvation of England. May you live in this prospect, ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... judgment on this sinful nation, For the abuse of so great dispensation; And, therefore, I resolve to change vocation. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... 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
... absence of the Civil Power, it will be considered contrary to professional etiquette for any respectable member of the criminal classes to carry on his unimpeded vocation. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... sufficient attention to a social phenomenon of a singularly perplexing kind. We hear enough, and more than enough, of persons who successfully cultivate the Arts—of the remarkable manner in which fitness for their vocation shows itself in early life, of the obstacles which family prejudice places in their way, and of the unremitting devotion which has led to the ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... 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, no girl might dream of a vocation: ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... or given her consent to take them, counted for nothing in the situation; though any experienced lady-superior could have told the archbishop that no maiden could be wisely made an abbess until she had given some signs of having a vocation for a ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... 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 ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... of the Kshatriya; and to tend (cattle), that of the Vaisya, while to serve the twice-born orders is said to be the duty of the Sudra. The Sudras cannot beg alms, or perform homas, or observe vows; and they must dwell in the habitation of their masters. Thy vocation, O son of Kunti, is that of the Kshatriya, which is to protect (the subjects). Do thou carry out thy own duties, in an humble spirit, restraining thy senses. That king alone can govern, who taketh counsel of experienced men, and is helped by honest, intelligent and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... has surely his vocation, and for each some peculiar method of life is more edifying than another. In my case, the habits of mind which I acquired in the world will cling to me in spite of myself even here. I cannot help watching the doings of others, studying their ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... I have troubled thee to come hither. God knows, I have not done it for myself, and not for mine own honor. I am zealous for the name and the honor of God, and I know thy desire is the same as mine, for it is thy vocation to make the glory of God to prevail on earth. I pray thee, therefore, to grant my petition, tell me with what means I can conquer Satan." Elijah at first endeavored to dissuade the Rabbi from his enterprise. He described the great power of ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... women with faith to try their 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
... bread, and He talked with us by the way. Yes, the vision of Christ binds us to work, and while the more close and intimate and silent communion has its rights and its place in life, it is never to be made a substitute for the active exercise of our Christian vocation to bear witness of Him, and to tell His name to those who need the consolation of His Resurrection, and the joyful news that He lives to bless. So then that meal by the wayside may stand as type and symbol of the way in which we, like the two ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... o'clock the stewards brought up the tables and proceeded to serve tea; and Villacampa, who somehow found himself seated between Senorita Isolda and Capitan Milsom, told himself that he had missed his vocation, and that he ought to have been skipper of an English steam- yacht—with a lovely and fascinating Spanish Senorita as a passenger— instead of second lieutenant of a ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... infant, and they were worshipped for some fancied good, for the benefits which they were supposed to bestow. There was an elaborate "division of labor" among them. A divinity presided over bakers, another over ovens,—every vocation and every household transaction ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... 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 ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... looking over some of the back numbers, I find the contents as lively, piquant, and interesting, as the best journals of to-day. Mr. Hood was born an editor, and to the day of his death he performed well his part; and when his Master bade him 'go up higher,' he left few peers behind him in his chosen vocation." ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... or name, or station, or they most assuredly will be trampled under foot. So our father said, and I think he judged rightly, when he advised Herbert to fix his thoughts on becoming a minister of the gospel. "If I am considered worthy, there is no vocation I would so gladly follow," was dear Herbert's answer. Those who knew him best would most assuredly have said that he was worthy, compared to the usual standard ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... church, and afterwards goes to spend his money in the public house? It is necessary, the priests will tell you, for man to have repose. But will he not seek repose when he is fatigued by the labor of his hands? Is it not more necessary that every man should labor in his vocation than go to a temple to chant over a service which benefits only the priests, or hear a sermon of which he can understand nothing? And do not such as find great scruple in doing a necessary labor on Sunday frequently sit down and get drunk on that day, ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... he was he had never become hardened, he had only become degraded. Crime was not his vocation. He had no gift for it; still the crime he had committed had never been discovered—the crime that he did with others. There were himself and Dupont and another. Dupont was coming to-night—Dupont who had profited ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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, ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... ingratitude, gained at the price of God knows what struggles, is it not, even apart from the divine vocation, the most equitable repartition of human love? Think that this elect creature becomes the scapegoat of sins committed, and like a lamentable daughter of Danaus she will unceasingly pour the offering of her mortifications and prayers, of her vigils and fastings, into the bottomless vessel ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... thing a young man should do after selecting his vocation is to become thoroughly satisfied with his choice. He must be thoroughly satisfied or he is defeated at the start. In arriving at this decision he must bear in mind that if he would find a calling in which all will be sunshine, where ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... farmer, to a great extent, the master of his vocation. With a sloppy, drenched, cold, uncongenial soil, which is saturated with every rain, and takes days, and even weeks, to become sufficiently dry to work upon, his efforts are constantly baffled by unfavorable weather, at those times when it is most important that his ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... is because I believe that the world is better, not worse, for having one more inhabitant who lives as becomes a civilized being. Let him whose soul prompts him to assail the iniquity of things, cry and spare not; let him who has the vocation go forth and combat. In me it would be to err from Nature's guidance. I know, if I know anything, that I am made for the life of tranquillity and meditation. I know that only thus can such virtue as I possess find scope. More than half a century ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... been feasting a poet from the bush, the latest discovery of the Editor. Such discoveries were the business, the vocation, the pride and delight of the only apostle of letters in the hemisphere, the solitary patron of culture, the Slave of the Lamp— as he subscribed himself at the bottom of the weekly literary page of his paper. He had had no difficulty ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... a certain vagueness of outline about her mind. I would not call her a fatalist, but she has little conception of the possibility of moulding character;—it's a rich mind, but perhaps an indecisive mind? Maud needed a vocation—she needed an aim. And then, too, you have perhaps observed—or possibly," said the Vicar gleefully, "she has effaced that characteristic out of deference to your own great power of amiable toleration—but she had a certain incisiveness of speech which had some power to wound? I will give ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had my adversary at a disadvantage. The sun of science, at my back, was in his eyes. But, on the present occasion, we are happily on an equality. History and Biblical criticism are as much, or as little, my vocation as they are that of Mr. Gladstone; the blinding from too much light, or the blindness from too little, may be presumed to be equally shared by ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... shepherd's dog appears to concentrate all his powers in his own immediate vocation; and in this does he exert and exhaust his whole capacity. If he be suddenly awoke, and hurriedly called, he rears himself up to see what sheep are running away, and he is so honourable, that he will lie among pails full of milk, and neither touch them himself, ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... this stupid sexual journey suggested by such vain, passive women, and the saner part of him was vexed at this compliance; he thought he had a real case against her. She was one of those beautiful women who are not only conscious of their beauty but have accepted it as their vocation. She was ensphered from the world of creative effort in the establishment of her own perfection. She was an end in herself as no human, save some old saint who has made a garden of his soul, had any ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... two hours with us: he is now freer, and can leave his father more easily, because his brothers, Albert and Clement, are in Warsaw. Every one says that Prince Clement is very good and very pious; he has a decided vocation for the ecclesiastical state, and it is presumed he will take orders. It is a proof of great wisdom on the king's part to consecrate one of his sons to God; but it is fortunate the choice did ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... paint, yet have never exhibited your pictures except in ladies' albums. You profess to love botany, yet your sole herbarium has been the mignonette in sewing-girls' windows. You are inoffensive, you are possessed of a competency, but in everything, in every vocation, you rest in the state of amateur—amateur housekeeper, amateur artist, amateur traveler, amateur geographer. And such a geographer as you might be, with your taste for travel and the Hakluyt Society's publications you have pored over ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... and not as aforesaid, strayed off into other scribbling. In an unfortunate hour, he had two or three papers accepted by first-class magazines, at three dollars the printed page, and, behold, his vocation was open to him. He would make his ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... of The Day newspaper, he was induced to lay aside the trowel and undertake the duties of reporter to that journal. The Day soon falling into the hands of other proprietors, Cunningham felt his situation uncomfortable, and returned to his original vocation, attaching himself to Francis Chantrey, then a young sculptor just commencing business. Chantrey soon rose, and ultimately attained the summit of professional reputation; Cunningham continued by him as the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... can we not withdraw this vexed question from politics? Why can we not adopt the principle of this bill as a rule of action in all new Territorial organizations? Why can we not deprive these agitators of their vocation and render it impossible for Senators to come here upon bargains on the slavery question? I believe that the peace, the harmony, and perpetuity of the Union require us to go back to the doctrines of the Revolution, to the principles of the Constitution, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... you'll say, to us and our vocation? Only thus much, that we have left our station, And made ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... my enforced stay in Daraga the natives brought me mussels and snails for sale; and several of them wished to enter my service, as they felt "a particular vocation for Natural History." At last my kitchen was always full of them. They sallied forth every day to collect insects, and as a rule were not particularly fortunate in their search; but this was of no consequence; in fact, it served ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... MacVourigh, and Lowlanders MacPherson of Cluny. He is a fine spirited boy, fond of his people and kind to them, and the best dancer of a Highland reel now living. I fear I must not add a third to Nimrod and Bran, having little use for them except being pleasant companions. As to labouring in their vocation, we have only one wolf which I know of, kept in a friend's menagerie near me, and no wild deer. Walter has some roebucks indeed, but Lochore is far off, and I begin to feel myself distressed at running down these innocent and beautiful creatures, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... own defence. There are, I am well aware, a handful of individual Socialists with us who are against universal military training, but they are a diminishing quantity, and will in due season find their natural vocation within the ranks of the Liberty ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... beauty should have been permitted by the Creator to swing my destiny to such an unforeseen direction. The monastery at whose doors I knocked had the most valid reasons for doubting the stability of my vocation. What the world loses in such fashion it often calls back as readily. In short, I cannot blame the Father Abbot for having forbidden me to apply for my army discharge. By his instructions, I asked for, and obtained, permission to be placed on the inactive ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... now no more. In the exercise of his vocation, he contrived at last to make himself the subject of a coroner's inquest. But he died like a brave man, and he lived an able one. I knew him personally, though slightly. Although several years my senior, we had been schoolfellows together at the 'grammar-schule' ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... have on this point. He says in his deposition, made many years after her death: "Although Jeanne sometimes talked playfully to amuse people, of things concerning the war which were not afterwards accomplished, yet when she spoke seriously of the war, and of her own career and her vocation, she never affirmed anything but that she was sent to raise the siege of Orleans and to lead the King to Rheims to ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... help you a little all the same," he said. "Monsieur Koupriane has told me that there is a deep mystery. It is my vocation to get to the bottom ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... was never in the Church, Harry," the widow said, in her sweet low tone, as they walked away together. (Now, it seemed they had never been parted, and again, as if they had been ages asunder.) "I always thought you had no vocation that way; and that 'twas a pity to shut you out from the world. You would but have pined and chafed at Castlewood: and 'tis better you should make a name for yourself. I often said so to my dear lord. How he loved you! 'Twas my lord that made you ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... upon him, but about Miss Allen's given name and her previous condition of servitude. He hoped that she was not a stenographer, and he hoped her first name was not Mary; and if you know the history of Andy Green you will remember that he had a reason for disliking both the name and the vocation. ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... safe to say that teachers enter upon their vocation without sufficient education. Our certificate requirements are low, and many enter upon teaching with little or no more schooling than that obtained in the schools where they begin teaching. Of course this is radically wrong, but it is the fault of our school ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... descending from such a height cannot reach the ground by himself. One of you will therefore have to lower the two others one at a time as one lowers a bucket or a bundle of wood, and he who does so will have to stay behind and go back to his cell. Which of you three has a vocation for this dangerous work of charity? And supposing that one of you is heroic enough to do so, can you tell me on which side you are going to descend? Not by the side towards the palace, for you would be seen; not by the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... and had orders that would carry him on for some years, and he was going where he could execute them, to where there were models, to where there was art, to where there was the joy of life, out of a damp religious atmosphere in which nothing flourished but the religious vocation. ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... her alone. Follow your own judgment, and not poor Jem's fidgets. He wants to be 'father, mother both, and uncle, all in one,' and so he misses his natural vocation of elder brother. He wants to make a woman of her before her time; and now he has his way with her at school, he shall let her have a little ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... we shall learn that the life of the experimental philosopher is twofold. He lives, in his vocation, a life of the senses, using his hands, eyes, and ears in his experiments: but such a question as that now before us carries him beyond the margin of the senses. He cannot consider, much less answer, the question, 'What is light?' without transporting himself to a world which underlies the sensible ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... help wondering, Virginia," said Priscilla, after they had all laughed again over Jean's letter, "I can't help wondering whether Greenie will consider this vocation thrust upon her!" ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... in his profession daily increased; and, with his fame, his friends. Possessing the virtues of humility and charity far above William, who was the professed teacher of those virtues, his reverend brother's disrespect for his vocation never once made him relax for a moment in his anxiety to gain him advancement in the Church. In the course of a few years, and in consequence of many fortuitous circumstances, he had the gratification of procuring for him the appointment ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... others it is a painted face. On the stage, of course, it is right and proper. The stage is a world of make-believe, and it is the business of the lady of sixty to give you the impression that she is a sweet young thing of seventeen. There is no affectation in this. It is her vocation to be young, and she follows it as willingly or unwillingly as you or I follow our respective callings. At the moment, for example, I would do anything to escape writing this article, for the sun is shining in the bluest of April skies and the bees are foraging ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... in his vocation as a picker-up of every unconsidered trifle, is an adept at charcoal-burning, on the sly. The business of legitimate charcoal-manufacture is also largely practised in the Pines, although the growing value of wood interferes sadly with the coalers. Here and there, however, a few ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... human existence was raised above the laws of natural life. The principal of motherhood is common to all the spheres of animal life, but man goes beyond this tie in gaining pre-eminence in the process of procreation, and thus becomes conscious of his higher vocation. In the paternal and spiritual principle he breaks through the bonds of tellurism, and looks upwards to the higher regions of the cosmos. Victorious fatherhood thus becomes as distinctly connected with the ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... with a hatchet. But it is worse economy to prevent a possible Watt from being anything but a stoker, or to give a possible Faraday no chance of doing anything but to bind books. Indeed, the loss in such cases of mistaken vocation has no measure; it is absolutely infinite and irreparable. And among the arguments in favour of the interference of the State in education, none seems to be stronger than this—that it is the interest of every one that ability should be neither wasted, nor misapplied, ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... art thou?" "O son Of Matilda and Alfred, it matters not! One Who is not of the living nor yet of the dead: To thee, and to others, alive yet"... she said... "So long as there liveth the poor gift in me Of this ministration; to them, and to thee, Dead in all things beside. A French Nun, whose vocation Is now by this bedside. A nun hath no nation. Wherever man suffers, or woman may soothe, There her land! there her kindred!" She bent down to smooth The hot pillow; and added... "Yet more than another Is thy life dear to me. For thy ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... dancing. The boys are at the board school, which 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 not exactly an ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... so much more to the credit of Rome. God knew she had never regretted her flight up the bays, and even had it not been for the perfidy of—she had forgotten his name; that at least was dead!—she would have realized her vocation the moment Sister Dominica sounded the call. When the famous nun, with that passionate humility all her own, had implored her to renounce the world, protested that her vocation was written in her face—she really looked like a juvenile mater dolorosa, particularly when she rolled up her eyes—eloquently ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various |
