Quotes from the Book

Here's a sampling of a few great quotes from Callings:

• Society and nature . . . tend to produce guarded creatures. The upshot is that we often end up trading our authenticity for what we perceive as survival, terrified to swap security for our heart’s deep desires, which is the imperative of all callings and one of the dominant fears in responding to them.
• Callings keep surfacing until we deal with them.
• Generally, people won’t pursue their callings until the fear of doing so is finally exceeded by the pain of not doing so, but it’s appalling how high a threshold people have for this quality of pain.
• “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life,” Campbell explained in The Power of Myth. “I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive . . . of the rapture of being alive.”
• Conflict to paradox to revelation: this is the divine progression.
• Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, wrote that “repression of the life-force” is the most common reason he sees people in therapy.
• Through art we can also reactivate the mind of the child within us, which knows what it knows with great simplicity and accuracy. The last time many of us made art was when we were children. In most of us, an artist died young and an adult survived. “Man as artist is far more ancient than man as worker.”
• We end up going to our shadows one way or another. Either we take them on willingly and attempt to work them into something useful, or at least manageable, or we splatter them onto others—“projecting,” as psychologists call it. For instance, if we’re frustrated with ourselves for not following a call, we often become frustrated with others who aren’t following theirs, or envious of those who are.
• We often decline the invitation of our callings because we feel inadequate to the task, but the opposite is also true: We’re afraid of our own power. “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,” says author Marianne Williamson. “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. But our playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.”

Whether you’re looking for a life change or not, Levoy reveals insights into human nature that will resonate with everyone. Callings is a compassionate guide to discovering your own callings and negotiating the tight passages to personal power and authenticity.