Dorothy Day Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can spend your time agonizing or organizing.

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.