Dorothy Day was a pioneering American journalist, social activist and devout Catholic convert who dedicated her life to fighting poverty and social injustice. She co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, and her unwavering commitment to social justice and non-violence continues to inspire people around the world today. Her life and work have been celebrated in books, films, and poetry, and her words of wisdom are still relevant and inspiring. Here are some of most memorable Dorothy Day quotes.
Dorothy Day Famous Catholic Quotes
“The cross is there, of course, but in the cross is the joy of spirit.”
☸ “Dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other.”
☸ “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”
☸ “Everything a baptized person does should be directly or indirectly related to the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy.”
☸ “Since when are words the only acceptable form of prayer?”
☸ “Obedience to God and disobedience to the State has, over and over again, happened throughout history.”
☸ “One of the disconcerting facts about the spiritual life is that God takes you at your word.”
☸ “It is only through religion that communism can be achieved, and has been achieved over and over.”
☸ “When you love people, you see all the good in them, all the Christ in them.”
☸ “Our faith is stronger than death, our philosophy is firmer than flesh.”
☸ “Freedom has its roots in religion.”
☸ “Think what the world could look like if we took care of the poor as we do our Bibles!”
☸ “If I have achieved anything in my life, it is because I have not been embarrassed to talk about God.”
☸ “Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.”
☸ “With prayer, one can go on cheerfully and even happily. Without prayer, how grim a journey!”
☸ “Common sense in religion is rare, and we are too often trying to be heroic instead of just ordinarily good and kind.”
☸ “When they call you a saint, it means basically that you are not to be taken seriously.”
☸ “The holy man was the whole man who not only tried to change the world but to live in it as it was.”
☸ “God meant for things to be much easier than we have made them.”
☸ “The basis of the liturgical movement is prayer, the liturgical prayer of the church.”
☸ “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.”
Dorothy Day Quotes As An Author
☸ “The work is more important than the talking and the writing about the work.”
☸ “People, wherever they are, can make a community.”
☸ “Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one.”
☸ “The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.”
“We must always aim for the impossible; if we lower our goal, we also diminish our effort.”
☸ “It is nice to knit a while, put down the needles, write a while, then take up the sock again.”
☸ “Spend some time reading good books. They tell too of days of striving and of strife.”
☸ “We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.”
☸ “You can spend your time agonizing or organizing.”
☸ “Recording happiness made it last longer often we settled some problem which beset us even while we wrote about it.”
Best Social Activist Quotes By Dorothy Day
☸ “It is people who are important, not the masses.”
☸ “No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.”
☸ “Communities are made up of the unlovable as well as the lovable.”
☸ “We must turn the other cheek, give up our cloak, go a second mile.”
☸ “Poverty is simple and complex at once; it is a social phenomenon and a personal matter..”
☸ “Our rule is the works of mercy. It is the way of sacrifice, worship, a sense of reverence.”
☸ “We must reach our brother, never toning down our fundamental oppositions.”
☸ “We must talk about poverty because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.”
☸ “Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself.”
☸ “They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.”
☸ “I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.”
“Charity is only as warm as those who administer it.”
☸ “Don’t worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.”
☸ “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?”
☸ “It is penance to work, to give oneself to others, to endure the pinpricks of community living.”
☸ “If you are going to try and change things, you had better have your wits about you.”
Dorothy Day Quotes On ‘Challenge Of The Day’ In Journalism
☸ “Idealism in the young, I guess I’m saying, is curiosity as well as goodness trying to express itself.”
☸ “If you feed the poor, you’re a saint. If you ask why they’re poor, you’re a Communist.”
☸ “Man alone is weak and adrift, that he must seek strength in common action.”
☸ “My very life is a protest. Against government.”
☸ “Too much praise makes you feel you must be doing something terribly wrong.”
☸ “You will know your vocation by the joy that it brings you. You will know when it’s right.”
☸ “Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”
☸ “Men are beginning to realize that they are not individuals but persons in society.”
“Words are as strong and powerful as bombs, as napalm.”
☸ “My radical associates were the ones who were in the forefront of the struggle for a better social order.”
☸ “We need to change the system.”
☸ “The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.”
Dorothy Day Quotes On Love
☸ “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.”
☸ “If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other’s faults and burdens.”
☸ “Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up.”
☸ “An act of love, a voluntary taking on oneself of some of the pain of the world, increases the courage and love.”
☸ “The final word is love.”
“Love in action is harsh and dreadful when compared to love in dreams.”
☸ “We certainly can try to grow in love, and it is good practice.”
☸ “We believe in loving our brothers regardless of race, color, or creed.”
☸ “I learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”
☸ “Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.”
☸ “The only thing we can do about people is to love them.”
Dorothy Day Quotes About Living
☸ “A conversion is a lonely experience.”
☸ “Women think with their whole bodies and they see things as a whole more than men do.”
☸ “We plant seeds that will flower as results in our lives, so best to remove the weeds of anger, avarice, envy, and doubt.”
☸ “We are not, most of us, capable of exalted emotion, save rarely.”
☸ “The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in this life.”
☸ “When it comes to labor and politics, I am inclined to be sympathetic to the left.”
☸ “Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair.”
☸ “Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul.”
☸ “We should live in such a way that our lives wouldn’t make much sense if the gospel were not true.”
☸ “It is not easy always to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight.”
☸ “There is plenty to do, for each one of us, working on our own hearts, changing our own attitudes, in our own neighborhoods.”
☸ “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.”
☸ “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.”
Final Thoughts
Dorothy day was a remarkable woman who dedicated her life to social justice and left a lasting legacy of inspiring quotes. Her words remind us to take a step back and focus on what really matters in life, such as love, faith, service, and justice.