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
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: Silence
One must really have suffered oneself to help others.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Suffering
Loneliness is the most terrible poverty.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Loneliness, One liners
I prefer you to make mistakes in kindness than work miracles in unkindness.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Kindness
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
Life is luck, make it.
—Mother Teresa
Without out suffering, our work would just be social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, not part of the Redemption. All the desolation of the poor people, not only their material poverty, but their spiritual destitution, must be redeemed. And we must share it, for only by being one with them can we redeem them by bringing God into their lives and bringing them to God.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Suffering
I am not sure exactly what heaven will be like, but I know that when we die and it comes time for God to judge us, he will not ask, ‘How many good things have you done in your life?’ rather he will ask, ‘How much love did you put into what you did?’
—Mother Teresa
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 you think well of others, you will also speak well of others and to others. From the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. If your heart is full of love, you will speak of love.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Abundance, Love
Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Wealth, Riches
It is poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Poverty
There should be less talk; a preaching point is not a meeting point. What do you do then? Take a broom and clean someone’s house. That says enough.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Action
Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do… but how much love we put in that action.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Love
What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Family
The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty.
—Mother Teresa
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Peace
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Helping, Mentoring, Action, One liners
Spread love everywhere you go: first of all in your own house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next door neighbor… let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eye, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greeting.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Kindness, God, War, Give, Love, Kind, Helping, Better, Smile
There are no great things, only small things with great love. Happy are those.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Achieving, Greatness & Great Things, Love
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
TODAY
Yesterday is gone.
Tomorrow has not yet come.
We have only today. Let us begin.
—Mother Teresa
God doesn’t look at how much we do, but with how much love we do it.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Love
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Judgement, Prejudice, Justice, Judgment, Love, Time, Service, People, Judges
Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so that children have very little time for their parents. Parents have very little time for each other, and in the home begins the disruption of peace of the world.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Peace
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
To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Aid, Resolve, Simplicity, Hope, Simple Living, Endurance, Assistance, Perseverance, Help
Words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Christianity
There is much suffering in the world—physical, material, mental. The suffering of some can be blamed on the greed of others. The material and physical suffering is suffering from hunger, from homelessness, from all kinds of diseases. But the greatest suffering is being lonely, feeling unloved, having no one. I have come more and more to realize that it is being unwanted that is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Love, Greed
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: Feelings, Advice, Disease, Purpose
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
Violence of the tongue is very real-sharper than any knife.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Violence
It is Christmas every time you let God love others through you…yes, it is Christmas every time you smile at your brother and offer him your hand.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Christmas
Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Smiles, Smile
So many signatures for such a small heart.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Bureaucracy
There must be a reason why some people can afford to live well. They must have worked for it. I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things that we could use.
—Mother Teresa
Let us not use bombs and guns to overcome the world. Let us use love and compassion. Peace begins with a smile—smile five times a day to someone you don’t really want to smile at all—do it for peace. So let us radiate the peace of God and so light his light.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Peace
We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But if that drop was not in the ocean, I think the ocean would be less because of that missing drop. I do not agree with the big way of doing things.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Charity, Doing Your Best
In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Little Things, Things, Love, Helping
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: Faith, Silence, Solitude
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