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 DayRead
As Dostoevski said: 'Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Love expressed through actions can be challenging and difficult, unlike the idealized notion of love in our dreams.
This quote highlights the contrast between the idealized notion of love, which often exists in our dreams or fantasies, and the reality of love as experienced through actions and commitments. Dorothy Day references Dostoevsky to emphasize that true love requires effort, sacrifice, and facing harsh realities, making it a more complex and sometimes daunting experience than simply dreaming of love.
Themes
LoveActionDreamsSacrificeReality
In practice
Example use cases
In a wedding speech, one could use this quote to illustrate the challenges of maintaining a loving relationship.
More from Dorothy Day
All quotes →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 DayRead
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 DayRead
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 DayRead
The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures.
Dorothy DayRead
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 DayRead
Similar quotes
It is a beautiful trait in the lover's character, that they think no evil of the object loved.
Henry Wadsworth LongfellowRead
If you’re the girl that needs a boyfriend, and once she loses that boyfriend needs to replace it with a different boyfriend, it’s just this constant stream of boyfriends all the time. I don’t feel like I ever want to be that girl. I want to be the girl that when she falls in love, it’s a big deal and it’s a rare thing.
Taylor SwiftRead
My Constanze is the virtuous, honourable, discreet, and faithful darling of her honest and kindly-disposed Mozart.
Wolfgang Amadeus MozartRead
Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.
Cesare PaveseRead
I've learned that you know your husband still loves you when there are two brownies left and he takes the smaller one.
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.Read
I'm not claiming divinity. I've never claimed purity of soul. I've never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can. But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.
John LennonRead