Dorothy Day Quotes

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

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

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

We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.

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

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

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

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.

No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There's too much work to do.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

You can spend your time agonizing or organizing.

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

What I want to bring out is how a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. And each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.

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

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

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

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

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

Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair.

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?

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

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

People, wherever they are, can make a community.

The only solution is love.

Men are beginning to realize that they are not individuals but persons in society, that man alone is weak and adrift, that he must seek strength in common action.

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.

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

I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.

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

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

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

The final word is love.

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

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

What we would like to do is change the world - make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended for them to do.

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

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