Dorothy Day Quotes - Page 4

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!

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

The final word is love.

Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair.

I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.

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

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

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

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

The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.

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

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.

We believe in loving our brothers regardless of race, color or creed and we believe in showing this love by working for better conditions immediately and the ultimate owning by the workers of their means of production.

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.

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.

It is not easy always to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight.

When we have spiritual reading at meals, when we have the rosary at night, when we have study groups, forums, when we go out to distribute literature at meetings, or sell it on the street corners, Christ is there with us.

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.

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

The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.

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

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.

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.

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