Top 100 Dorothy Day Quotes
#1. True obedience is a matter of love, which makes it voluntary, not compelled by fear or force.
Dorothy Day
#2. Love is an exchange of gifts,' Saint Ignatius had said. It was in these simple, practical, down-to-earth ways that people could show their love for each other. If the love was not there in the beginning, but only the need, such gifts made love grow.
Dorothy Day
#3. One of the greatest evils of the day among those outside of prison is their sense of futility. Young people say, What is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment.
Dorothy Day
#4. Christ is God or He is the world's greatest liar and imposter.
Dorothy Day
#5. God meant for things to be much easier than we have made them
Dorothy Day
#6. For me Christ was not to be bought for thirty pieces of silver but with my heart's blood. We buy not cheap in this market.
Dorothy Day
#7. Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair.
Dorothy Day
#8. Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily.
Dorothy Day
#9. When you love people, you see all the good in them, all the Christ in them. God sees Christ, His Son, in us and loves us. And so we should see Christ in others, and nothing else, and love them. There can never be enough of it. There can never be enough thinking about it.
Dorothy Day
#10. We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.
Dorothy Day
#11. Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.
Dorothy Day
#12. It is we ourselves that we have to think about, no one else. That is the way the saints worked. They paid attention to what they were doing, and if others were attracted to them by their enterprise, why, well and good. But they looked to themselves first of all.
Dorothy Day
#13. As we come to know the seriousness of the situation, the war, the racism, the poverty in our world, we come to realize that things will not be changed simply by words or demonstrations. Rather, it's a question of living one's life in a drastically different way.
Dorothy Day
#15. If you feed the poor, you're a saint. If you ask why they're poor, you're a Communist.
Dorothy Day
#16. Recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us even while we wrote about it.
Dorothy Day
#17. I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.
Dorothy Day
#18. My whole life so far, my whole experience has been that our failure has been not to love enough. This conviction brought me to a rejection of the radical movement after my early membership in the Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Communist affiliates I worked with.
Dorothy Day
#19. We must always aim for the impossible; if we lower our goal, we also diminish our effort.
Dorothy Day
#20. Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed.
Dorothy Day
#21. We are the nation the most powerful, the most armed and we are supplying arms and money to the rest of the world where we are not ourselves fighting. We are eating while there is famine in the world.
Dorothy Day
#22. Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul.
Dorothy Day
#23. As Dostoevski said: 'Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.
Dorothy Day
#24. The work is more important than the talking and the writing about the work.
Dorothy Day
#25. The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.
Dorothy Day
#26. The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
Dorothy Day
#27. First of all, let it be remembered that I speak as an ex-Communist and one who has not testified before Congressional Committees, nor written works on the Communist conspiracy.
Dorothy Day
#28. If you have two coats, one of them belongs to the poor.
Dorothy Day
#29. Everything a baptized person does every day should be directly or indirectly related to the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy.
Dorothy Day
#30. You see I'm such a fool that I'm never afraid of appearing foolish.
Dorothy Day
#31. The older I get, the more I meet people, the more convinced I am that we must only work on ourselves, to grow in grace. The only thing we can do about people is to love them.
Dorothy Day
#32. As for ourselves, yes, we must be meek, bear injustice, malice, rash judgment. We must turn the other cheek, give up our cloak, go a second mile.
Dorothy Day
#33. The vanity of Eve, that desire to exercise power, to seduce, to drag down!
Dorothy Day
#34. It is people who are important, not the masses.
Dorothy Day
#35. I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.
Dorothy Day
#37. "How can you see Christ in people?" And we only say: It is an act of faith, constantly repeated. It is an act of love, resulting from an act of faith. It is an act of hope, that we can awaken these same acts in their hearts, too, with the help of God ...
Dorothy Day
#38. I have been disillusioned, however, this long, long time in the means used by any but the saints to live in this world God has made for us.
Dorothy Day
#39. If I have achieved anything in my life, it is because
I have not been embarrassed to talk about God.
Dorothy Day
#40. Often we comfort ourselves only with words, but if we pray enough, the conviction will come too that Christ is our King, not Stalin, Bevins, or Truman. That He has all things in His hands, that 'all things work together for good for those that love Him.
Dorothy Day
#41. Thank God that He has permitted us to live among the present problems. It is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre.
Dorothy Day
#42. When it comes to labor and politics, I am inclined to be sympathetic
to the left, but when it comes to the Catholic Church, then I am far to
the right.
Dorothy Day
#43. Too much praise makes you feel you must be doing something terribly wrong.
Dorothy Day
#44. We certainly can try to grow in love, and it is good practice, this giving what we've got, whether it is a cup of coffee or money to pay the grocery bill.
Dorothy Day
#45. No matter how corrupt the Church may become, it carries within it the seeds of its own regeneration.
Dorothy Day
#46. Our faith is stronger than death, our philosophy is firmer than flesh, and the spread of the Kingdom of God upon the earth is more sublime and more compelling.
Dorothy Day
#47. Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?
Dorothy Day
#49. Your love for God is only as great as the love you have for the person you love the least.
Dorothy Day
#50. When they call you a saint, it means basically that you are not to be taken seriously.
Dorothy Day
#51. When it comes down to it, even on the natural plane, it is much happier and more enlivening to love than to be loved.
Dorothy Day
#52. We are not, most of us, capable of exalted emotion, save rarely.
Dorothy Day
#53. It is penance to work, to give oneself to others, to endure the pinpricks of community living.
Dorothy Day
#54. Common sense in religion is rare, and we are too often trying to be heroic instead of just ordinarily good and kind.
Dorothy Day
#55. Don't worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.
Dorothy Day
#56. The mystery of poverty is that by sharing in it, making ourselves poor in giving to others, we increase our knowledge of and belief in love.
Dorothy Day
#57. Knitting is very conducive to thought. It is nice to knit a while, put down the needles, write a while, then take up the sock again.
Dorothy Day
#58. I felt, even at fifteen, that God meant man to be happy, that He meant to provide him with what he needed to maintain life in order to be happy, and that we did not need to have quite so much destruction and misery as I saw all around and read of in the daily press.
Dorothy Day
#59. I too complain ceaselessly in my heart and in my words too. My very life is a protest. Against government, for instance.
Dorothy Day
#60. I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.
Dorothy Day
#61. They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.
Dorothy Day
#62. Words are as strong and powerful as bombs, as napalm.
Dorothy Day
#63. Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.
Dorothy Day
#64. You will know your vocation by the joy that it brings you. You will know. You will know when it's right.
Dorothy Day
#65. We should live in such a way that our lives wouldn't make much sense if the gospel were not true.
Dorothy Day
#66. If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other's faults and burdens.
Dorothy Day
#67. It is only through religion that communism can be achieved, and has been achieved over and over.
Dorothy Day
#68. The only way to live in any true security is to live so close to the bottom that when you fall you do not have far to drop, you do not have much to lose.
Dorothy Day
#69. Dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.
Dorothy Day
#70. We must recognize the fact that many Nazis, Marxists and Fascists believe passionately in their fundamental rightness, and allow nothing to hinder them from their goal in the pursuit of their mission.
Dorothy Day
#71. We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.
Dorothy Day
#72. It is not easy always to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight.
Dorothy Day
#73. We believe in loving our brothers regardless of race, color or creed and we believe in showing this love by working for better conditions immediately and the ultimate owning by the workers of their means of production.
Dorothy Day
#74. Together with the Works of Mercy, feeding, clothing and sheltering our brothers, we must indoctrinate.
Dorothy Day
#75. If you are going to try and change things, you had better have your wits about you.
Dorothy Day
#77. If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.
Dorothy Day
#78. Charity is only as warm as those who administer it.
Dorothy Day
#79. When we have spiritual reading at meals, when we have the rosary at night, when we have study groups, forums, when we go out to distribute literature at meetings, or sell it on the street corners, Christ is there with us.
Dorothy Day
#81. The works of mercy are the opposite of the works of war, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, nursing the sick, visiting the prisoner. But we are destroying crops, setting fire to entire villages and to the people in them. We are not performing the works of mercy but the works of war.
Dorothy Day
#82. My strength returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the psalms.
Dorothy Day
#83. For to Ade, ... the holy man was the whole mad, the man of integrity, who not only tried to change the world, but to live in it as it was.
Dorothy Day
#84. I offered up a special prayer, a prayer which came with tears and anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.
Dorothy Day
#85. We need to change the system. We need to overthrow, not the government, as the authorities are always accusing the Communists 'of conspiring to teach [us] to do,' but this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering in the whited sepulcher of New York.
Dorothy Day
#86. Most of our life is unimportant, filled with trivial things from morning till night. But when it is transformed by love it is of interest even to the angels.
Dorothy Day
#87. With prayer, one can go on cheerfully and even happily. Without prayer, how grim a journey!
Dorothy Day
#88. Women think with their whole bodies and they see things as a whole more than men do.
Dorothy Day
#89. Where are the heroes and the saints, who keep a clear vision of man's greatest gift, his freedom, to oppose not only the dictatorship of the proletariat, but also the dictatorship of the benevolent state, which takes possession of the family, and of the indigent, and claims our young for war?
Dorothy Day
#90. What I want to bring out is how a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words, and deeds is like that.
Dorothy Day
#91. If you are rushed for time, sow time and you will reap time. Go to church and spend a quiet hour in prayer. You will have more time than ever and your work will get done. Sow time with the poor. Sit and listen to them, give them your time lavishly. You will reap time a hundredfold.
Dorothy Day
#92. When people are standing up for our present rotten system, they are being worse than Communists, it seems to me.
Dorothy Day
#93. We are all called to be saints, St. Paul says, and we might as well get over our bourgeois fear of the name. We might also get used to recognizing the fact that there is some of the saint in all of us.
Dorothy Day
#94. I believe that we must reach our brother, never toning down our fundamental oppositions, but meeting him when he asks to be met, with a reason for the faith that is in us, as well as with a loving sympathy for them as brothers.
Dorothy Day
#95. What else do we all want, each one of us, except to love and be loved, in our families, in our work, in all our relationships?
Dorothy Day
#96. We cannot build up the idea of the apostolate of the laity without the foundation of the liturgy.
Dorothy Day
#97. We also know that religion, as the Marxists have always insisted, has, too often, like an opiate, tended to put people to sleep to the reality and the need for the present struggle for peace and justice.
Dorothy Day
#98. We plant seeds that will flower as results in our lives, so best to remove the weeds of anger, avarice, envy and doubt, that peace and abundance may manifest for all.
Dorothy Day
#99. It is easier to have faith that God will support each House of Hospitality and Farming Commune and supply our needs in the way of food and money to pay bills, than it is to keep a strong, hearty, living faith in each individual around us - to see Christ in him.
Dorothy Day
#100. We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.
Dorothy Day
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