Topic

Devotion

Devotion — the orientation of one's energy, attention, and commitment toward something larger than momentary desire — is among the most meaning-generating of human stances. The quotes gathered here examine devotion in its religious, personal, and professional forms, finding in all of them a common structure: the sustained giving of oneself to something one regards as genuinely worthy. Religious devotion — the structured practice of prayer, ritual, and service that connects practitioners to the sacred — appears prominently here, as does the secular devotion of artists to their craft, parents to their children, and citizens to their communities. What these forms share is the willingness to be changed by the object of devotion: to let it make claims on one's time and energy, to let it expand one's sense of what matters, to let it reshape one's identity around a commitment larger than comfort. Devotion, these voices suggest, is not a sacrifice of the self but a way of becoming more fully oneself.

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Everybody likes to go their own way--to choose their own time and manner of devotion

Source: Mansfield Park (1814)

Plenty of people wish to become devout, but no one wishes to be humble

Complaint is the largest Tribute Heaven receives, and the sincerest Part of our Devotion.

Source: Thoughts on Various Subjects

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life

A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than you love yourself

The majority of men devote the greater part of their lives to making their remaining years unhappy.

There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.

Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.

Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.

Humanity needs practical men, who get the most out of their work, and, without forgetting the general good, safeguard their own interests. But humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit.