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
Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift to himself.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Prayer
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
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
Kind words may be short… but their echoes are endless.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Words
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
If you give what you do not need, it isn’t giving.
—Mother Teresa
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
No matter who says what,
you should accept it with a smile and do your own work.
—Mother Teresa
Keep in mind that our community is not composed of those who are already saints, but of those who are trying to become saints. Therefore let us be extremely patient with each other’s faults and failures.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Difficulty
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Prejudice, Love, Judgment, Time, Justice, Service, People
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, Purpose
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
The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty.
—Mother Teresa
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
TODAY
Yesterday is gone.
Tomorrow has not yet come.
We have only today. Let us begin.
—Mother Teresa
There are no great things, only small things with great love. Happy are those.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Love
If each of us would only sweep our own doorstep, the whole world would be clean.
—Mother Teresa
If a rose represents love,
and love is everlasting,
then why does a rose wither and die?
—Mother Teresa
Never travel faster than your guardian angel can fly.
—Mother Teresa
Life is luck, make it.
—Mother Teresa
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
Love is a fruit in season at all times, and in reach of every hand.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Love
When I was crossing into Gaza,
I was asked at the checkpost whether I was carrying any weapons.
I replied: Oh yes, my prayer books.
—Mother Teresa
In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Love, Helping
Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.
—Mother Teresa
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
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