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

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

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