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

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, Advice, Disease, Feelings

Love until it hurts. Real love is always painful and hurts; then it is real and pure.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Love

God speaks in the silence of the heart. Listening is the beginning of prayer.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Prayer

What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Family

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 you judge people, you have no time to love them.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Love, Time, Judgment, Prejudice, People, Justice, Judgement, Service, Judges

Holiness is doing God’s will with a smile.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: God

I prefer you to make mistakes in kindness than work miracles in unkindness.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Kindness

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

It is poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Poverty

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

Kind words may be short… but their echoes are endless.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Words

We want to create hope for the person … we must give hope, always hope.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Aspirations, Hope

Jesus said love one another. He didn’t say love the whole world.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: World

Duty is a very personal thing. It is what comes from knowing the need to take action and not just a need to urge others to do something.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Duty

God hasn’t called me to be successful. He’s called me to be faithful.
—Mother Teresa

I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Helping

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat. We must find each other.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Sympathy

A smile is the beginning of peace.
—Mother Teresa

So many signatures for such a small heart.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Bureaucracy

Somebody loves us, too – God Himself. We have been created to love and to be loved.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: God

It is not how much we do, but how much love we put into doing it. It is not how much we give, but how much love we put into giving.
—Mother Teresa

Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Riches, Wealth

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.
—Mother Teresa

Sweetest Lord, make me appreciative of the dignity of my high vocation, and its many responsibilities. Never permit me to disgrace it by giving way to coldness, unkindness, or impatience.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Career

Joy is very infectious; therefore, be always full of joy.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Joy

In … silence we find a new energy and a real unity. God’s energy becomes our, allowing us to perform things well.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Silence

Peace begins with a smile. Only God knows our true needs.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Smiles, Smile

Love is a fruit in season at all times, and in reach of every hand.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Love

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

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