Dorothy Day Quotations

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

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.

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

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

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. When we begin to take the lowest places, to wash the feet of others, to love our brothers with that burning love, that passion which led to the cross, then we can truly say, 'Now I have begun'

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.

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.

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

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

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

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

My radical associates were the ones who were in the forefront of the struggle for a better social order where there would not be so many poor.

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

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.

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. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.

I really only love God as much as I love the person I 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....We can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing that we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.

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

Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up. If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other's faults and burdens. If we love enough, we are going to light that fire in the hearts of others. And it is love that will burn out the sins and hatreds that sadden us. It is love that will make us want to do great things for each other. No sacrifice and no suffering will then seem too much. Yes, I see only too clearly how bad people are. I wish I did not see it so. It is my own sins that give me such clarity.

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

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.

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

What we would like to do is change the world...by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world.

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 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.

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

Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only improvish them further. Give only if you have something you must give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward.

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

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

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

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

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.

I cannot worry much about your sins and miseries when I have so many of my own. I can only love you all, poor fellow travelers, fellow sufferers. I do not want to add one least straw to the burden you already carry. My prayer from day to day is that God will so enlarge my heart that I will see you all, and live with you all, in His love.

Over and over again, people had to disobey lawful authority to follow the voice of their conscience. This obedience to God and disobedience to the State has, over and over again, happened throughout history. It is time again to cry out against our 'leaders,' to question (since it is not for us to say that they are evil) whether or not they are sane.

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

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

I do not know how to love God except by loving the poor. I do not know how to serve God except by serving the poor.... Here, within this great city of nine million people, we must, in this neighborhood, on this street, in this parish, regain a sense of community which is the basis for peace in the world.

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.

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

An individual can march for peace or vote for peace and can have, perhaps, some small influence on global concerns. But the same individual is a giant in the eyes of a child at home. If peace is to be built, it must start with the individual. It is built brick by brick.

How necessary it is to cultivate a spirit of joy. It is a psychological truth that the physical acts of reverence and devotion make one feel devout. The courteous gesture increases one's respect for others. To act lovingly is to begin to feel loving, and certainly to act joyfully brings joy to others which in turn makes one feel joyful. I believe we are called to the duty of delight.

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

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

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

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.

You can spend your time agonizing or organizing.

To feed the hungry, clothe the naked and shelter the harborless without also trying to change the social order so that people can feed, clothe and shelter themselves is just to apply palliatives. It is to show a lack of faith in one’s fellows, their responsibilitie s as children of God, heirs of heaven.

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

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

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

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

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

Poverty is a strange and elusive thing. ... I condemn poverty and I advocate it; poverty is simple and complex at once; it is a social phenomenon and a personal matter. Poverty is an elusive thing, and a paradoxical one. We need always to be thinking and writing about it, for if we are not among its victims its reality fades from us. We must talk about poverty because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.

Maybe I was praying for him then, in my own way. Does God have a set way of prayer, a way that He expects each of us to follow? I doubt it. I believe some people-- lots of people-- pray through the witness of their lives, through the work they do, the friendships they have, the love they offer people and receive from people. Since when are words the only acceptable form of prayer?

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

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.

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

The only solution is love.

We want no revolution; we want the brotherhood of men. We want men to love one another. We want all men to have what is sufficient for their needs. And now - strange thought - the devil has so maneuvered that the people turn from Him because those who profess Him are clothed in soft raiment and sit at well-spread tables and deny the poor.

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.

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

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?

I felt that the Church was the Church of the poor,... but at the same time, I felt that it did not set its face against a social order which made so much charity in the present sense of the word necessary. I felt that charity was a word to choke over. Who wanted charity? And it was not just human pride but a strong sense of man's dignity and worth, and what was due to him in justice, that made me resent, rather than feel pround of so mighty a sum total of Catholic institutions.

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

"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...

Everything a baptized person does each day should be directly or indirectly related to the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up.

True love is delicate and kind, full of gentle perception and understanding, full of beauty and grace, full of joy unutterable. There should be some flavor of this in all our love for others. We are all one. We are one flesh in the Mystical Body as man and woman are said to be one flesh in marriage. With such a love one would see all things new; we would begin to see people as they really are, as God sees them.

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?

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

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

Paperwork, cleaning the house, dealing with the innumerable visitors who come all through the day, answering the phone, keeping patience and acting intelligently, which is to find some meaning in all that happens-these things, too, are the works of peace, and often seem like a very little way.

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.

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

If I did not believe, if I did not make what is called an act of faith (and each act of faith increases our faith, and our capacity for faith), if I did not have faith that the works of mercy do lighten the sum total of suffering in the world, so that those who are suffering on both sides of this ghastly struggle somehow mysteriously find their pain lifted and some balm of consolation poured on their wounds, if I did not believe these things, the problem of evil would indeed be overwhelming.

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

The final word is love.

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

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 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.

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

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

How much did I hear of religion as a child? Very little, and yet my heart leaped when I heard the name of God. I do believe every soul has a tendency toward God.

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

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.

Whatever I had read as a child about the saints had thrilled me. I could see the nobility of giving one's life for the sick, the maimed, the leper. But there was another question in my mind. Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place? Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?

To love with understanding and without understanding. To love blindly, and to folly. To see only what is loveable. To think only of these things. To see the best in everyone around, their virtues rather than their faults. To see Christ in them!

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.

The Sexual Revolution is a complete rebellion against authority, natural and supernatural, even against the body and its needs, its natural functions of child bearing. This is not reverence for life, it is a great denial and more resembles Nihilism than the revolution that they think they are furthering.

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