Top 120 Dorothy Day Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”

— Dorothy Day

Featured in: Love Is Quotes

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

— Dorothy Day

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

— Dorothy Day

4. “No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.”

— Dorothy Day

5. “We must always aim for the impossible; if we lower our goal, we also diminish our effort.”

— Dorothy Day

6. “Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul.”

— Dorothy Day

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

— Dorothy Day

8. “No matter how corrupt the Church may become, it carries within it the seeds of its own regeneration.”

— Dorothy Day

9. “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

10. “We should live in such a way that our lives wouldn’t make much sense if the gospel were not true.”

— Dorothy Day

11. “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?”

— Dorothy Day

12. “If you feed the poor, you’re a saint. If you ask why they’re poor, you’re a Communist.”

— Dorothy Day

13. “What I want to bring out is how a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words, and deeds is like that.”

— Dorothy Day

14. “If you have two coats, one of them belongs to the poor.”

— Dorothy Day

15. “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.”

— Dorothy Day

16. “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

17. “Don’t worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.”

— Dorothy Day

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

— Dorothy Day

19. “God meant for things to be much easier than we have made them.”

— Dorothy Day

20. “There is plenty to do, for each one of us, working on our own hearts, changing our own attitudes, in our own neighborhoods.”

— Dorothy Day

21. “The only solution is love.”

— Dorothy Day

22. “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

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

— Dorothy Day

24. “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

25. “True obedience is a matter of love, which makes it voluntary, not compelled by fear or force.”

— Dorothy Day

26. “They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.”

— Dorothy Day

27. “It is people who are important, not the masses.”

— Dorothy Day

28. “Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed.”

— Dorothy Day

29. “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

30. “We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.”

— Dorothy Day

31. “You can spend your time agonizing or organizing.”

— Dorothy Day

32. “Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.”

— Dorothy Day

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

— Dorothy Day

34. “Everything a baptized person does each day should be directly or indirectly related to the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.”

— Dorothy Day

35. “If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other’s faults and burdens.”

— Dorothy Day

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

— Dorothy Day

37. “The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures.”

— Dorothy Day

38. “You will know your vocation by the joy that it brings you. You will know. You will know when it’s right.”

— Dorothy Day

39. “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

40. “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.”

— Dorothy Day

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

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

— Dorothy Day

45. “Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair.”

— Dorothy Day

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.”

— Dorothy Day

50. “Too much praise makes you feel you must be doing something terribly wrong.”

— Dorothy Day