110+ Dorothy Day Quotes On Community, Eucharist And Peace

Dorothy Day was an American journalist, social activist, and devout Catholic convert. She is best known for founding the Catholic Worker Movement, a pacifist movement that combines direct aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf. Day wrote for many Catholic publications and was an early advocate for women's rights and civil rights. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Dorothy Day on community, love, eucharist.

Top 10 Dorothy Day Quotes

1. We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.
2. The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
3. I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.
4. 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.
5. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There's too much work to do.
6. Don't worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.
7. Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.
8. 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.
9. There is plenty to do, for each one of us, working on our own hearts, changing our own attitudes, in our own neighborhoods.
10. My strength returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the psalms.

Dorothy Day Image Quotes

Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul. — Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day Short Quotes

• Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul.
• Women think with their whole bodies and they see things as a whole more than men do.
• You can spend your time agonizing or organizing.
• Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair.
• They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.
• The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.
• We cannot build up the idea of the apostolate of the laity without the foundation of the liturgy.
• It is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.
• A 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' becomes again another dictator.
• The saying of Vatican II is above all, 'Conscience is supreme.'

Dorothy Day Quotes About Community

Communities are made up of the unlovable as well as the lovable. — Dorothy Day

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

It is penance to work, to give oneself to others, to endure the pinpricks of community living. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

There could be a 'community of communities' rather than a state. They would be united in some way but without any governing body. It would be made up of unions, credit unions instead of banks. There would be no more lending at interest. There would be no more money lenders. — Dorothy Day

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

The sense is always that community is natural to people. — Dorothy Day

People, wherever they are, can make a community. — Dorothy Day

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

Dorothy Day Quotes About 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. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

Dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend. — Dorothy Day

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

"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. — Dorothy Day

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? — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

The final word is love. — Dorothy Day

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

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

Dorothy Day Quotes About Peace

An individual can march for peace or vote for peace and can have, perhaps, some small influence on global concerns. But the same individual is a giant in the eyes of a child at home. If peace is to be built, it must start with the individual. It is built brick by brick. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

We also know that religion, as the Marxists have always insisted, has, too often, like an opiate, tended to put people to sleep to the reality and the need for the present struggle for peace and justice. — Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day Quotes About War

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. — Dorothy Day

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? — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day Quotes About Prayer

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. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

With prayer, one can go on cheerfully and even happily. Without prayer, how grim a journey! — Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day Quotes About Work

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

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. — Dorothy Day

Everything a baptized person does each day should be directly or indirectly related to the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. — Dorothy Day

First of all, let it be remembered that I speak as an ex-Communist and one who has not testified before Congressional Committees, nor written works on the Communist conspiracy. — Dorothy Day

Often we comfort ourselves only with words, but if we pray enough, the conviction will come too that Christ is our King, not Stalin, Bevins, or Truman. That He has all things in His hands, that 'all things work together for good for those that love Him. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

Together with the Works of Mercy, feeding, clothing and sheltering our brothers, we must indoctrinate. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

The work is more important than the talking and the writing about the work. — Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day Quotes About Poor

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. — Dorothy Day

I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

This is so rich a country that luxury has developed at the expense of necessities, and even the destitute partake of the luxury. We are the rich country of the world, like Dives at the feast. We must try hard, we must study to be poor like Lazarus at the gate, who was taken into Abraham's bosom. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed. — Dorothy Day

If you have two coats, one of them belongs to the poor. — Dorothy Day

If you feed the poor, you're a saint. If you ask why they're poor, you're a Communist. — Dorothy Day

Think what the world could look like if we took care of the poor even half as well as we do our Bibles! — Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day Quotes About Faith

Our faith is stronger than death, our philosophy is firmer than flesh, and the spread of the Kingdom of God upon the earth is more sublime and more compelling. — Dorothy Day

It is easier to have faith that God will support each House of Hospitality and Farming Commune and supply our needs in the way of food and money to pay bills, than it is to keep a strong, hearty, living faith in each individual around us - to see Christ in him. — Dorothy Day

I believe that we must reach our brother, never toning down our fundamental oppositions, but meeting him when he asks to be met, with a reason for the faith that is in us, as well as with a loving sympathy for them as brothers. — Dorothy Day

Be close enough to people so that you are indifferent to the material. And also have faith. — Dorothy Day

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

Dorothy Day Quotes About Loving

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

It's Godlike to love man - even in his sin - merely because he's man. — Dorothy Day

When it comes down to it, even on the natural plane, it is much happier and more enlivening to love than to be loved. — Dorothy Day

We certainly can try to grow in love, and it is good practice, this giving what we've got, whether it is a cup of coffee or money to pay the grocery bill. — Dorothy Day

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! — Dorothy Day

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

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. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

The only solution is love. — Dorothy Day

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

Dorothy Day Quotes About World

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. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

We are the nation the most powerful, the most armed and we are supplying arms and money to the rest of the world where we are not ourselves fighting. We are eating while there is famine in the world. — Dorothy Day

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

Christ is God or He is the world's greatest liar and imposter. — Dorothy Day

I have been disillusioned, however, this long, long time in the means used by any but the saints to live in this world God has made for us. — Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day Quotes About Christ

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. — Dorothy Day

For me Christ was not to be bought for thirty pieces of silver but with my heart's blood. We buy not cheap in this market. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day Famous Quotes And Sayings

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'. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

I do not know how to love God except by loving the poor. I do not know how to serve God except by serving the poor.... Here, within this great city of nine million people, we must, in this neighborhood, on this street, in this parish, regain a sense of community which is the basis for peace in the world. — Dorothy Day

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

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

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. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

To feed the hungry, clothe the naked and shelter the harborless without also trying to change the social order so that people can feed, clothe and shelter themselves is just to apply palliatives. It is to show a lack of faith in one’s fellows, their responsibilitie s as children of God, heirs of heaven. — Dorothy Day

Men are beginning to realize that they are not individuals but persons in society, that man alone is weak and adrift, that he must seek strength in common action. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

As for ourselves, yes, we must be meek, bear injustice, malice, rash judgment. We must turn the other cheek, give up our cloak, go a second mile. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

Knitting is very conducive to thought. It is nice to knit a while, put down the needles, write a while, then take up the sock again. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

The whole point of view of the anarchist is that everything must start from the bottom up, from man. It seems to me so human a philosophy. — Dorothy Day

Certainly we disagree with the Communist Party, as we disagree with other political parties who are trying to maintain the American way of life. — Dorothy Day

The theoretician of the Marxist revolution in Cuba certainly wasn't Castro. It was Don Carlos Rafaelo Rodriguez. He was the theoretician and very often people say he will take over. But I don't believe it. I think that it's a very good combination - the Catholic man working together with a man like that who has everything pretty well planned. — Dorothy Day

When people are standing up for our present rotten system, they are being worse than Communists, it seems to me. — Dorothy Day

We must recognize the fact that many Nazis, Marxists and Fascists believe passionately in their fundamental rightness, and allow nothing to hinder them from their goal in the pursuit of their mission. — Dorothy Day

The Communists in Cuba didn't assist Castro in his revolution. They weren't on the side of the students. They didn't do anything to help in the invasion or the long-continuing struggle from the Oriente province down. — Dorothy Day

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? — Dorothy Day

Marx.... Lenin.... Mao Tse-Tung.... These men were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe though their ends meant the seizure of power, and the building of mighty armies, the compulsion of concentration camps, the forced labor and torture and killing of tens of thousands, even millions. — Dorothy Day

There is something so horrifying and so sad when people are living alone. That is why the old and lonely come to us. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

Maybe I was praying for him then, in my own way. Does God have a set way of prayer, a way that He expects each of us to follow? I doubt it. I believe some people-- lots of people-- pray through the witness of their lives, through the work they do, the friendships they have, the love they offer people and receive from people. Since when are words the only acceptable form of prayer? — Dorothy Day

Too much praise makes you feel you must be doing something terribly wrong. — Dorothy Day

I can write no other than this: unless we use the weapons of the spirit, denying ourselves and taking up our cross and following Jesus, dying with Him and rising with Him, men will go on fighting, and often from the highest motives, believing that they are fighting defensive wars for justice and in self-defense against present or future aggression. — Dorothy Day

If we had had the privilege of giving hospitality to a Ho Chi Minh, with what respect and interest we would have served him, as a man of vision, as a patriot, a rebel against foreign invaders. — Dorothy Day

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. — Dorothy Day

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

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

Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily. — Dorothy Day

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

To try to stop war by placing before men's eyes the terrible suffering involved will never succeed, because men are willing (in their thoughts and imaginations at least) to face any kind of suffering when motivated by noble aims like the vague and tremendous concept of freedom ... Or, in their humility (or sloth - who knows?) men are quite willing to leave decisions to others 'who know more about it than we do. — Dorothy Day

No matter how corrupt the Church may become, it carries within it the seeds of its own regeneration. — Dorothy Day

Recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us even while we wrote about it. — Dorothy Day

Words are as strong and powerful as bombs, as napalm. — Dorothy Day

We're living in an age of genocide. ...And we do believe that there is not only the genocide of war, and the genocide that took place with the extermination of the Jews, but the whole program....of birth control and abortion is another form of genocide.... [T]hey claim the poor are bringing forth tremendous numbers of children and so the solution is to kill them off. — Dorothy Day

Life Lessons by Dorothy Day

1. Dorothy Day taught the importance of living a life of service and compassion for others. She dedicated her life to helping the poor and advocating for social justice.
2. She showed that it is possible to make a positive difference in the world, no matter how small, and to stand up for what one believes in.
3. She also taught the importance of perseverance, as she faced many hardships and difficulties in her life, but never gave up on her mission.