Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day, Obl.S.B.,was an American journalist, social activist, and Catholic convert...
ProfessionCivil Rights Leader
Date of Birth8 November 1897
CityNew York City, NY
prayer love-you heart
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 travelers, fellow sufferers. I do not want to add one least straw to the burden you already carry. My prayer from day to day is that God will so enlarge my heart that I will see you all, and live with you all, in His love.
gratitude giving feel-good
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.
success effectiveness worry
Don't worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.
loneliness being-alone community-living
We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.
forgiveness weed flower
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.
goal effort impossible
We must always aim for the impossible; if we lower our goal, we also diminish our effort.
attitude heart neighborhood
There is plenty to do, for each one of us, working on our own hearts, changing our own attitudes, in our own neighborhoods.
cities people community
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.
agonizing
You can spend your time agonizing or organizing.
writing simple reality
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.
food soul body
Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul.
morning angel night
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.
affair messy haphazard
Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair.
easier made
God meant for things to be much easier than we have made them