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
Love until it hurts. Real love is always painful and hurts; then it is real and pure.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Love
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 you can’t feed a hundred people, then just feed one.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Helping, Kindness, Service, Action
Love begins by taking care of the closest ones-the ones at home.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Love
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
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
Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift to himself.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Prayer
Live simply so others may simply live.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: How to Live
Somebody loves us, too – God Himself. We have been created to love and to be loved.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: God
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
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
A smile is the beginning of peace.
—Mother Teresa
We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Kindness
Silence gives us a new way of looking at something.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Silence
God speaks in the silence of the heart. Listening is the beginning of prayer.
—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
If we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people to not kill each other? Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want.
—Mother Teresa
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
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: Aid, Assistance, Help
If there are people who feel that God wants them to change the structures of society, that is something between them and their God. We must serve him in whatever way we are called. I am called to help the individual; to love each poor person. Not to deal with institutions. I am in no position to judge.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Correction, Reform
Violence of the tongue is very real-sharper than any knife.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Violence
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
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
To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Help, Perseverance, Simplicity, Hope, Endurance, Aid, Assistance, Resolve, Simple Living
What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Family
So many signatures for such a small heart.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Bureaucracy
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
If a rose represents love,
and love is everlasting,
then why does a rose wither and die?
—Mother Teresa
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
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
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