Quotes by Dorothy Day

“The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart.”

“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no ones definition of your life, but define yourself.”

“Never utter these words: I do not know this, therefore it is false. One must study to know; know to understand; understand to judge.”

“We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.”

“Dont call me a saint. I dont want to be dismissed so easily.”

“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”

“Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.”

“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 have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.

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?

Dont worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.

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

Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.

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

The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.

The vanity of Eve, that desire to exercise power, to seduce, to drag down!

Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.

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?

MEDITATION ON THE BUS. Rainy and cold. Thinking gloomily of the sins and shortcomings of others, it suddenly came to me to remember my own offenses, just as heinous as those of others. If I concern myself with my own sins and lament them, if I remember my own failures and lapses, I will not be resentful of others. This was most cheering and lifted the load of gloom from my mind. It makes one unhappy to judge people and happy to love them.

My soul hath thirsted after the strong living God; when shall I come and appear before the face of God? (Psalm 42:2) But the Psalmist also says, In death there is no one that is mindful of thee. So it made me happy that I could be with my mother the last few weeks of her life, and for the last ten days at her bedside daily and hourly. Sometimes I thought to myself that it was like being present at a birth to sit by a dying person and see their intentness on what is happening to them. It almost seems that one is absorbed in a struggle, a fearful, grim, physical struggle, to breathe, to swallow, to live. And so, I kept thinking to myself, how necessary it is for one of their loved ones to be beside them, to pray for them, to offer up prayers for them unceasingly, as well as to do all those little offices one can. When my daughter was a little tiny girl, she said to me once, When I get to be a great big woman and you are a little tiny girl, Ill take care of you, and I thought of that when I had to feed my mother by the spoonful and urge her to eat her custard. How good God was to me, to let me be there. I had prayed so constantly that I would be beside her when she died; for years I had offered up that prayer. And God granted it quite literally. I was there, holding her hand, and she just turned her head and sighed.