Dorothy Day
True obedience is a matter of love, which makes it voluntary, not compelled by fear or force.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Compassion
People, wherever they are, can make a community.Collection: People
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Strong
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?Collection: Children
We're under obligation to love - that's the commandment.Collection: Obligation
You see I'm such a fool that I'm never afraid of appearing foolish.Collection: Fool
To me, birth control and abortion are genocide.I say, make room for children, don't do away with them.Collection: Children
The only solution is love.Collection: Love
We are all called to be saints, St. Paul says, and we might as well get over our bourgeois fear of the name. We might also get used to recognizing the fact that there is some of the saint in all of us.Collection: Names
When you love people, you see all the good in them, all the Christ in them. God sees Christ, His Son, in us and loves us. And so we should see Christ in others, and nothing else, and love them. There can never be enough of it. There can never be enough thinking about it.Collection: Son
Think what the world could look like if we took care of the poor even half as well as we do our Bibles!Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Morning
Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only improvish them further. Give only if you have something you must give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward.Collection: Gratitude
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Love Is
Dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.Collection: Heart
How necessary it is to cultivate a spirit of joy. It is a psychological truth that the physical acts of reverence and devotion make one feel devout. The courteous gesture increases one's respect for others. To act lovingly is to begin to feel loving, and certainly to act joyfully brings joy to others which in turn makes one feel joyful. I believe we are called to the duty of delight.Collection: Kindness
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.Collection: Rights
We must always aim for the impossible; if we lower our goal, we also diminish our effort.Collection: Goal
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.Collection: Writing
The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures.Collection: Mistake
We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.Collection: Heaven
There is plenty to do, for each one of us, working on our own hearts, changing our own attitudes, in our own neighborhoods.Collection: Attitude
An act of love, a voluntary taking on oneself of some of the pain of the world, increases the courage and love and hope of all.Collection: Love
I cannot worry much about your sins and miseries when I have so many of my own. I can only love you all, poor fellow travellers, fellow sufferers. I do not want to add one least straw to the burden you already carry.Collection: Prayer
Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed.Collection: Atheist
No matter how corrupt the Church may become, it carries within it the seeds of its own regeneration.Collection: Church
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.Collection: New York
Everything a baptized person does each day should be directly or indirectly related to the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.Collection: Spiritual
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?Collection: War
We want no revolution; we want the brotherhood of men. We want men to love one another. We want all men to have what is sufficient for their needs. And now - strange thought - the devil has so maneuvered that the people turn from Him because those who profess Him are clothed in soft raiment and sit at well-spread tables and deny the poor.Collection: Men
When they call you a saint, it means basically that you are not to be taken seriously.Collection: Taken
Castro wasn't a Marxist. He was a Catholic educated by the Christian Brothers and the Jesuits. But fundamentally, I'm not talking about practising Catholics, but rather about something which is inbred; that is, a part of your country, your heritage, your life.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Phones
The work is more important than the talking and the writing about the work.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Cities
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.Collection: Prayer
And I was to find out then, as I found out so many times, over and over again, that women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. A child is not enough. A husband and children, no matter how busy one may be kept by them, are not enough. Young and old, even in the busiest years of our lives, we women especially are victims of the long loneliness.Collection: Husband
The Sexual Revolution is a complete rebellion against authority, natural and supernatural, even against the body and its needs, its natural functions of child bearing. This is not reverence for life, it is a great denial and more resembles Nihilism than the revolution that they think they are furthering.Collection: Children
The idea that when the health of one member suffers, the health of the whole body is lowered is a teaching of St Paul which is timeless.Collection: Teaching
I was always much impressed, in reading prison memoirs of revolutionists, such as Lenin and Trotsky ... by the amount of reading they did, the languages they studied, the range of their plans for a better social order. (Or rather, for a new social order.) In the Acts of the Apostles there are constant references to the Way and the New Man.Collection: Reading
One of the disconcerting facts about the spiritual life is that God takes you at your word.Collection: Spiritual
Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?Collection: Order