Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Mother Teresa (Roman Catholic Nun)

Mother Teresa (1910–97,) fully Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu, born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, honored as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, was a controversial Catholic nun, missionary, and social worker. This winner of the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize founded the Order of Missionaries of Charity, which became renowned for its work among the poor and the destitute in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in India.

Born in Shkup, Albania, in the Ottoman Empire (now Skopje, Macedonia,) Teresa was educated by Irish missionary nuns. Deciding to become a nun, she trained in Dublin and took her first missionary duty in Calcutta. She taught high school for several years and worked her way up to school principal.

On one occasion, Teresa came across a destitute woman dying on the street and decided to sit with her stroking her head until she died. That incident motivated her to establish a new religious order to nurse the “unwanted, unloved, and uncared for.” By the time she died, the Order of the Missionaries of Charity had consisted of more than 5,000 nuns and brothers, operating more than 2,500 orphanages, schools, clinics, and hospices in 120 countries.

Mother Teresa was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2003 and canonized by Pope Francis I in 2016; her feast day is September 5.

Controversy swirls around Teresa’s legacy. The journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens called her “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud” and “a lying, thieving Albanian dwarf.” In an extended essay, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995,) Hitchens censured her for indulging the rich and powerful “while preaching obedience and resignation to the poor.” A letter she wrote around when she won the Nobel Prize revealed the crisis of faith that afflicted her—she acknowledged how she no longer had any experience of God.

Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta (2007) is an anthology of Teresa’s letters. Kathryn Spink wrote Mother Teresa: A Complete Authorized Biography (1997.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Mother Teresa

There are no great things, only small things with great love. Happy are those.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Achieving, Love

It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us. It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our own home. Bring love into your home for this is where our love for each other must start.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Love

Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Mentoring, Action, One liners, Helping

I never look at the masses as my responsibility; I look at the individual. I can only love one person at a time – just one, one, one. So you begin. I began – I picked up one person. Maybe if I didn’t pick up that one person, I wouldn’t have picked up forty-two thousand….The same thing goes for you, the same thing in your family, the same thing in your church, your community. Just begin – one, one, one.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Responsibility

To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Aid, Assistance, Hope, Perseverance, Resolve, Simple Living, Simplicity, Endurance, Help

As each Sister is to become a Co-Worker of Christ in the slums, each ought to understand what God and the Missionaries of Charity expect from her. Let Christ radiate and live his life in her and through her in the slums. Let the poor, seeing her, be drawn to Christ and invite him to enter their homes and their lives. Let the sick and suffering find in her a real angel of comfort and consolation. Let the little ones of the streets cling to her because she reminds them of him, the friend of the little ones.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Evangelism

Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls. A joyful heart is the inevitable result of a heart burning with love.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Excitement, Love, Heart, Joy

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Love

Life is luck, make it.
Mother Teresa

The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty.
Mother Teresa

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or cancer or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for, deserted by everybody. The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference towards one’s neighbor.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Purpose, Feelings, Disease, Advice

No matter who says what,
you should accept it with a smile and do your own work.
Mother Teresa

If you are discouraged it is a sign of pride, because it shows you trust in your own powers. Never bother about other people’s opinions. Be humble and you will never be disturbed. Remember St. Aloysius, who said he would continue to play billiards even if he knew he was going to die. Do you play well? Sleep well? Eat well? These are duties. Nothing is small for God.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Power, God, Action, People

People throughout the world may look different or have a different religion, education, or position, but they are all the same. They are the people to be loved. They are all hungry for love.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Humanity

Smile at each other, smile at your wife, smile at your husband, smile at your children, smile at each other—it doesn’t matter who it is—and that will help you to grow up in greater love for each other.
Mother Teresa

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Love

Loneliness is the most terrible poverty.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Loneliness, One liners

Jesus taught us how to forgive out of love, how to forget out of humility. So let us examine our hearts and see if there is any unforgiven hurt—any unforgotten bitterness! It is easy to love those who are far away. It isn’t always easy to love those who are right next to us. It is easier to offer food to the hungry than to answer the lonely suffering of someone who lacks love right in one
Mother Teresa
Topics: Conflict

If faith is lacking, it is because there is too much selfishness, too much concern for personal gain. For faith to be true, it has to be generous and loving. Love and faith go together, they complete each other.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Faith, Love

The trouble is that rich people, well-to-do people, very often don’t really know who the poor are; and that is why we can forgive them, for knowledge can only lead to love, and love to service. And so, if they are not touched by them, it’s because they do not know them.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Riches, Wealth

Silence gives us a new way of looking at something.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Silence

Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace. Money will come if we seek first the Kingdom of God—the rest will be given.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Help, Assistance, Aid

I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn’t touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Love

If a rose represents love,
and love is everlasting,
then why does a rose wither and die?
Mother Teresa

Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Giving, Wealth

There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread, but there are many more dying for a little love.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Helping

If love was an ocean, but you were afraid of the water,
would you stand in the sand and look at it waiting
to feel the mists or the waves or would you take the chance,
dive right in and not think about it.
Mother Teresa

In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Helping, Love, Things, Little Things

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass – grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence…. We need silence to be able to touch souls.
Mother Teresa
Topics: Solitude, Silence, Faith

A smile is the beginning of peace.
Mother Teresa

Wondering Whom to Read Next?

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *