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  "heading": "Quotes about vocation",
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  "parent": {
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    "heading": "Quotes about passion"
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      "slug": "there-are-many",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/hermann-hesse/the-glass-bead-game/there-are-many",
      "text": "There are many types and kinds of vocation, but the core of the experience is always the same: the soul is awakened by it, transformed or exalted, so that instead of dreams and presentiments from within a summons comes from without.",
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      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/terry-pratchett/moving-pictures/you-know-what",
      "text": "\"You know what the greatest tragedy in the whole world is?\" said Ginger, not paying him the least attention. \"It's all the people who never find out what it is they really want to do or what it is they're really good at. It's all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths. It's all the people who could be really fantastic flute players who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument, so they become bad plowmen instead. It's all the people with talents who never even find out. Maybe they are never even born in a time when it's even possible to find out.\" (pp. 141-142)",
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      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton/the-pleasures-and-sorrows-of-work/symons-remarked-that",
      "text": "Symons … remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited—long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms—what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true calling.",
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      "text": "As instanced by Virgil and Dante, the vocation of artisthood bears some analogy to those of mythic-herohood and messiahship—conspicuously so for the Romantics and the great early Modernists, with their characteristic conception of the artist as hero (one recalls James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, originally named Stephen Hero, vowing to \"forge, in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race\"), more modestly so even for Postmoderns. In at least some cases, the present author's included, one's apprentice sense of calling may be far from clear. even to oneself. … One may be uncertain of both one's vocation and one's talent for it, or confident of one of those but not the other, or confident of both but mistaken, or doubtful of both but mistaken, or correct on one or both counts. In the happiest case, one comes to have reasonable faith in both calling and gift and at least some \"objective\" confirmation that that faith is not altogether misplaced. But \"real, non-scripted life\" is slippery terrain, in which templates and prophecies are ill-defined, elastic, arguable, and verdicts are forever subject to reversal. One crosses one's fingers, invokes one's muse and does one's best.",
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      "slug": "i-am-a-great",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-gauguin/the-writings-of-a-savage/i-am-a-great",
      "text": "I am a great artist and I know it. It's because of what I am that I have endured so much suffering, so as to pursue my vocation, otherwise I would consider myself a rogue — which is what many people think I am, for that matter. Oh well, what difference does it make. What upsets me the most is not so much the poverty as the things that perpetually get in the way of my art, which I cannot carry out the way I feel and which I would carry out if it weren't for the poverty that is like a straitjacket. You tell me I am wrong to stay away from the artist[ic] center. No, I am right; I've known for a long time what I am doing and why I am doing it. My artistic center is in my brain and nowhere else, and I am strong because I am never thrown off-course by other people and because I do what is in me.",
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      "text": "Each man had only one genuine vocation — to find the way to himself",
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      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/no-one-can",
      "text": "No one can advise or help you — no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.",
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        "name": "Rainer Maria Rilke",
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      "slug": "moyers-do-you",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/joseph-campbell/the-power-of-myth/moyers-do-you",
      "text": "Moyers: Do you ever have the sense of... being helped by hidden hands? Campbell: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time — namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.",
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      "author": {
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      "text": "The way to find out about your happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you really are happy-not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what I call \"following your bliss.\"",
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      "text": "The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.",
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      "text": "It matters little to me whether my pupil is intended for the army, the church, or the law. Before his parents chose a calling for him nature called him to be a man. Life is the trade I would teach him. When he leaves me, I grant you, he will be neither a magistrate, a soldier, nor a priest; he will be a man. All that becomes a man he will learn as quickly as another. In vain will fate change his station, he will always be in his right place.",
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      "text": "There are callings so great that they cannot be undertaken for money without showing our unfitness for them; such callings are those of the soldier and the teacher.",
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        {
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        "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emile,_or_On_Education#Book_I",
        "license": {
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