Dorothy Day quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Dorothy Day on Wise Famous Quotes.

Your love for God is only as great as the love you have for the person you love the least.

One of the disconcerting facts about the spiritual life is that God takes you at your word.

To me, birth control and abortion are genocide.I say, make room for children, don't do away with them.

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.

True obedience is a matter of love, which makes it voluntary, not compelled by fear or force.

My strength returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the psalms.

Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.

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.

Charity is only as warm as those who administer it.

The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.

Think what the world could look like if we took care of the poor even half as well as we do our Bibles!

When people are standing up for our present rotten system, they are being worse than Communists, it seems to me.

There are two things you should know about the poor: they tend to smell, and they are ungrateful.

With prayer, one can go on cheerfully and even happily. Without prayer, how grim a journey!

Freedom has its roots in religion ...

Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed.

We cannot build up the idea of the apostolate of the laity without the foundation of the liturgy.

The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.

Everything a baptized person does every day should be directly or indirectly related to the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy.

If I have achieved anything in my life, it is because
I have not been embarrassed to talk about God.

Too much praise makes you feel you must be doing something terribly wrong.

Have we even begun to be Christians?

The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?

You see I'm such a fool that I'm never afraid of appearing foolish.

Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul.

We must always aim for the impossible; if we lower our goal, we also diminish our effort.

We are not, most of us, capable of exalted emotion, save rarely.

The final word is love.

Words are as strong and powerful as bombs, as napalm.

Dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.

It is only through religion that communism can be achieved, and has been achieved over and over.

An act of love, a voluntary taking on oneself of some of the pain of the world, increases the courage and love and hope of all.

They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.

Our rule is the works of mercy ... It is the way of sacrifice, worship, a sense of reverence.

The vanity of Eve, that desire to exercise power, to seduce, to drag down!

We should live in such a way that our lives wouldn't make much sense if the gospel were not true.

It is penance to work, to give oneself to others, to endure the pinpricks of community living.

The only answer in this life, to the loneliness we are all bound to feel, is community.

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.

I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.

It is people who are important, not the masses.

Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily.

Idealism in the young, I guess I'm saying, is curiosity as well as goodness trying to express itself.

When they call you a saint, it means basically that you are not to be taken seriously.

Together with the Works of Mercy, feeding, clothing and sheltering our brothers, we must indoctrinate.

A conversion is a lonely experience.

God meant for things to be much easier than we have made them

I too complain ceaselessly in my heart and in my words too. My very life is a protest. Against government, for instance.

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?

We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.

Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.

When it comes down to it, even on the natural plane, it is much happier and more enlivening to love than to be loved.

Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair.

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.

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.

You will know your vocation by the joy that it brings you. You will know. You will know when it's right.

It is not easy always to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight.

Thank God that He has permitted us to live among the present problems. It is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre.

If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other's faults and burdens.

Women think with their whole bodies and they see things as a whole more than men do.

Christ is God or He is the world's greatest liar and imposter.

The best things to do with the best things in life is to give them away.

Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.

If you are going to try and change things, you had better have your wits about you.

The work is more important than the talking and the writing about the work.

Common sense in religion is rare, and we are too often trying to be heroic instead of just ordinarily good and kind.

You can spend your time agonizing or organizing.

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.

Don't worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.

If you feed the poor, you're a saint. If you ask why they're poor, you're a Communist.

If you have two coats, one of them belongs to the poor.

There is plenty to do, for each one of us, working on our own hearts, changing our own attitudes, in our own neighborhoods.

Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?

The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures.

The only solution is love.

No matter how corrupt the Church may become, it carries within it the seeds of its own regeneration.

As Dostoevski said: 'Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.

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.

Certainly we disagree with the Communist Party, as we disagree with other political parties who are trying to maintain the American way of life.

I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.