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

Love, to be real, must cost – it must hurt – it must empty us of self.
—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

I believe in person to person. Every person is Christ for me, and since there is only one Jesus, that person is the one person in the world at that moment.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Christianity, Religion

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

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

We must have a real living determination to reach holiness. “I will be a saint” means I will despoil myself of all that is not God; I will strip my heart of all created things; I will live in poverty and detachment; I will renounce my will, my inclinations, my whims and fancies, and make myself a willing slave to the will of God.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Saints

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

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

God doesn’t look at how much we do, but with how much love we do it.
—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

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

If each of us would only sweep our own doorstep, the whole world would be clean.
—Mother Teresa

Life is luck, make it.
—Mother Teresa

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 am like a little pencil in God’s hand. He does the writing. The pencil has nothing to do with it.
—Mother Teresa

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: Silence, Solitude, Faith

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

One must really have suffered oneself to help others.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Suffering

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, People, God, Action

There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.
—Mother Teresa
Topics: Appreciation

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

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

God hasn’t called me to be successful. He’s called me to be faithful.
—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: Greed, Love

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

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

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

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

A smile is the beginning of peace.
—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

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