Dorothy Day quotes
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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 -
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 -
The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
-- Dorothy Day -
Women think with their whole bodies and they see things as a whole more than men do.
-- Dorothy Day -
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We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.
-- Dorothy Day -
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 -
If I have achieved anything in my life, it is because I have not been embarrassed to talk about God.
-- Dorothy Day -
The final word is love.
-- Dorothy Day -
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My strength returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the psalms.
-- Dorothy Day -
I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.
-- Dorothy Day -
You will know your vocation by the joy that it brings you. You will know. You will know when it's right.
-- Dorothy Day -
Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed.
-- Dorothy Day -
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Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul.
-- Dorothy Day -
Don't worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.
-- Dorothy Day -
The only solution is love.
-- Dorothy Day -
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.
-- Dorothy Day -
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They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.
-- Dorothy Day -
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.
-- Dorothy Day -
Common sense in religion is rare, and we are too often trying to be heroic instead of just ordinarily good and kind.
-- Dorothy Day -
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 -
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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 -
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 -
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.
-- Dorothy Day -
Charity is only as warm as those who administer it.
-- Dorothy Day -
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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?
-- Dorothy Day -
Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.
-- Dorothy Day -
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.
-- Dorothy Day -
Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up.
-- Dorothy Day -
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We cannot build up the idea of the apostolate of the laity without the foundation of the liturgy.
-- Dorothy Day -
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 -
I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.
-- Dorothy Day -
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 -
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It is people who are important, not the masses.
-- Dorothy Day -
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.
-- Dorothy Day -
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.
-- Dorothy Day -
Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.
-- Dorothy Day -
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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 -
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.
-- Dorothy Day -
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 -
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.
-- Dorothy Day -
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Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair.
-- Dorothy Day -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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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.
-- Dorothy Day -
We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.
-- Dorothy Day -
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 -
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?
-- Dorothy Day -
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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 -
Your love for God is only as great as the love you have for the person you love the least.
-- Dorothy Day -
Our rule is the works of mercy... It is the way of sacrifice, worship, a sense of reverence.
-- Dorothy Day -
The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.
-- Dorothy Day -
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If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other’s faults and burdens.
-- Dorothy Day -
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.
-- Dorothy Day -
If you feed the poor, you're a saint. If you ask why they're poor, you're a Communist.
-- Dorothy Day -
To try to stop war by placing before men's eyes the terrible suffering involved will never succeed, because men are willing (in their thoughts and imaginations at least) to face any kind of suffering when motivated by noble aims like the vague and tremendous concept of freedom ... Or, in their humility (or sloth - who knows?) men are quite willing to leave decisions to others 'who know more about it than we do.
-- Dorothy Day -
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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'
-- Dorothy Day -
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 -
And I was to find out then, as I found out so many times, over and over again, that women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. A child is not enough. A husband and children, no matter how busy one may be kept by them, are not enough. Young and old, even in the busiest years of our lives, we women especially are victims of the long loneliness.
-- Dorothy Day -
A conversion is a lonely experience.
-- Dorothy Day -
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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 -
I can write no other than this: unless we use the weapons of the spirit, denying ourselves and taking up our cross and following Jesus, dying with Him and rising with Him, men will go on fighting, and often from the highest motives, believing that they are fighting defensive wars for justice and in self-defense against present or future aggression.
-- Dorothy Day -
Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.
-- Dorothy Day -
We are not, most of us, capable of exalted emotion, save rarely.
-- Dorothy Day -
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One of the disconcerting facts about the spiritual life is that God takes you at your word.
-- Dorothy Day -
No matter how corrupt the Church may become, it carries within it the seeds of its own regeneration.
-- Dorothy Day -
"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 -
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 -
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The only answer in this life, to the loneliness we are all bound to feel, is community.
-- Dorothy Day -
If we had had the privilege of giving hospitality to a Ho Chi Minh, with what respect and interest we would have served him, as a man of vision, as a patriot, a rebel against foreign invaders.
-- Dorothy Day -
I was always much impressed, in reading prison memoirs of revolutionists, such as Lenin and Trotsky ... by the amount of reading they did, the languages they studied, the range of their plans for a better social order. (Or rather, for a new social order.) In the Acts of the Apostles there are constant references to the Way and the New Man.
-- Dorothy Day -
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 -
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Too much praise makes you feel you must be doing something terribly wrong.
-- Dorothy Day -
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.
-- Dorothy Day -
Think what the world could look like if we took care of the poor even half as well as we do our Bibles!
-- Dorothy Day -
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 -
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With prayer, one can go on cheerfully and even happily. Without prayer, how grim a journey!
-- Dorothy Day -
Of all the charges made against the Communists these days of congressional investigations, the charge of loose morals is seldom heard, so very loose have become those of "Christian" people.
-- Dorothy Day -
We have all probably noted those sudden moments of quiet - those strange and almost miraculous moments in the life of a big city when there is a cessation of traffic noise - just an instant when there is only the sound of footsteps which serves to emphasize a sudden peace. During those seconds it is possible to notice the sunlight, to notice our fellow humans, to take breath.
-- Dorothy Day -
This is so rich a country that luxury has developed at the expense of necessities, and even the destitute partake of the luxury. We are the rich country of the world, like Dives at the feast. We must try hard, we must study to be poor like Lazarus at the gate, who was taken into Abraham's bosom.
-- Dorothy Day -
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We must always aim for the impossible; if we lower our goal, we also diminish our effort.
-- Dorothy Day -
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 -
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 -
When they call you a saint, it means basically that you are not to be taken seriously.
-- Dorothy Day -
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Two years ago, I was saying as I planted seeds in the garden, "I must believe in these seeds, that they fall into the earth and grow into flowers and radishes and beans." It is a miracle to me because I do not understand it. The very fact that they use glib technical phrases does not make it any less a miracle, and a miracle we all accept. Then why not accept God's miracles?
-- Dorothy Day
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