Virgo Sun Sign Profile: August 23 - September 23

"Three things are to be looked to in a building: that it stand on the right spot, that it be securely founded, that it be successfully executed."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born in Virgo, August 18, 1749.

"The happiness of man consists in life. And life is in labor.... The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people."
Count Tolstoy, born in Virgo, August 28, 1828.

To discover the motivating drive in the life of any Virgoan, it is necessary to look at the work he is doing; for so deep is Virgo's utilitarian sense that he identifies himself with his work and is quite willing to lose himself in it. His personality and character development depend, to a peculiar extent, on the nature of the work he has set himself, for he will be as big or as small as his job or mission. He is capable of becoming single-tracked, absorbed and narrow over whatever he happens to fall into. He is capable of making work his god, and thus going high and far in a chosen direction. He is capable of expanding his spirit by selecting a career somehow related to service. He is capable of the extremes of self-denial if he thinks his work calls him to that. And he is also capable of feeling that his work requires self-immolation, self-limitation and self-sacrifice to an inordinate degree.
However you figure it, the puzzle of his nature will be solved if you find his attitude toward the hub of his universe, his work. So true is this that when you run across an unemployed Virgoan you have the most woebegone and incomplete personality in the world. In losing his work, Virgo loses his whole reason for being. In its best forms, this makes for efficiency and brilliance in the performance of duty, and it may take the sense of duty into very humane realms of selflessness. In its worst form, it makes for narrowness of outlook, great inability to talk anything but shop, lack of interest in anything not related to work. So engrossed does Virgo become in his job (talk, mission, message or whatever he calls it) that he sometimes seems intent on destroying all the rest of the personality that doesn't belong to his work.
He loses interest in extracurricular activities, so that his life is one long routine of keeping the nose to the grindstone, and he is unhappy when for some reason or other the grindstone stops or his nose gets away from it. To fix the aim high, to select a job that requires diverse talents and wide knowledge, is Virgo's best bet for a well-rounded life. If he has the misfortune to be able to find progress and security in a rut, he is likely to see only the progress and not realize it is a rut. He needs activities, companions, fun, diversions, hobbies to broaden his life, and should seek these along constructive lines lest his overtaxed body and brain force him to seek them in undesirable forms of escapism, brooding and introversion.