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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.
Dorothy Day
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Interpretation

What this quote means

True love for God is demonstrated through love and service to the poor.

In this quote, Dorothy Day emphasizes the importance of serving the less fortunate as a fundamental expression of one's love for God. She suggests that genuine faith is interconnected with acts of compassion and community-building, highlighting the need to foster a sense of togetherness to achieve peace and harmony in a diverse urban setting.

Themes

LoveServiceCommunityGodPeacePoor

In practice

Example use cases

In a speech about community service, one could quote this to inspire action.

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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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.
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Men are beginning to realize that they are not individuals but persons in society, that man alone is weak and adrift, that he must seek strength in common action.
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Quote by Dorothy Day | QuoteProject