Top 189 Quotes & Sayings by Dorothy Day - Page 2

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

The works of mercy are the opposite of the works of war, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, nursing the sick, visiting the prisoner. But we are destroying crops, setting fire to entire villages and to the people in them. We are not performing the works of mercy but the works of war.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Communities are made up of the unlovable as well as the lovable.

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.

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?

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?

People, wherever they are, can make a community.

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.

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

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

"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.

Voluntary poverty isn't going around with some burlap bag around you and imitating the poor. It means being indifferent to the material, doing as Christ said. He went and sat down with the rich and Zachaeus and publicans and sinners.

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?

When it comes to labor and politics, I am inclined to be sympathetic to the left, but when it comes to the Catholic Church, then I am far to the right.

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?

When you love people, you see all the good in them, all the Christ in them.

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

The anarchist philosophy is that the new social order is to be built up by groupings of men together in communities - whether in communities of work or communities of culture or communities of artists - but in communities.

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.

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.

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

There's enough hate in the world. I command you to love. And you have to make an effort.

The final word is love.

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.

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.

The only solution is love.

Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair.

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!

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

The holy man was the whole man, the man of integrity, who not only tried to change the world, but to live in it as it was.

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

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

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.

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

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

Some have more capacity. Some proceed a few steps along the way. But Christ seemed to love all men. He desired all to be saved.

We're under obligation to love - that's the commandment.

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.

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

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

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

God forbid we should have great institutions. The thing is to have many small centres. The ideal is community.

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.

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

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

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