Dorothy Day Quotes - Page 3

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

So many sins against the poor cry out to high heaven! One of the most deadly sins is to deprive the laborer of his hire. There is another: to instill in him paltry desires so compulsive that he is willing to sell his liberty and his honor to satisfy them. We are all guilty of concupiscence, but newspapers, radios, television, and battalions of advertising men (woe to that generation!) deliberately stimulate our desires, the satisfaction of which so often means the degradation of the family.

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.

People, wherever they are, can make a community.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

The only solution is love.

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