Dorothy Day > Quotes

“The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart.”
― Dorothy Day

“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.
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― Dorothy Day

“I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”
― Dorothy Day

“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, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist

“Don't worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.”
― 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 them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute--the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words--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 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 our friend.”
― 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

“Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair.”
― Dorothy Day

“It is people who are important, not the masses.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist

“Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”
― Dorothy Day

“My strength returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the psalms. ”
― Dorothy Day

“Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed. ”
― Dorothy Day

“We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.”
― Dorothy Day

“The final word is love.”
― 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

“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

“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.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist

“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!”
― 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.”
― Dorothy Day

“Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.”
― Dorothy Day

“Love in action is harsh and dreadful when compared to love in dreams.”
― 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”
― Dorothy Day

“As Dostoevski said: 'Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.”
― Dorothy Day

“Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily. ”
― Dorothy Day

“The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.”
― Dorothy Day

“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, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist

“Once a priest told us that no one gets up in the pulpit without promulgating a heresy. He was joking, of course, but what I suppose he meant was the truth was so pure, so holy, that it was hard to emphasize one aspect of the truth without underestimating another, that we did not see things as a whole, but through a glass darkly, as St. Paul said.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist

“Charity is only as warm as those who administer it.”
― Dorothy Day