Quotes by Mother Teresa

"The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted."

Mother Teresa on disease
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"It's not how much we give but how much love we put into giving."

Mother Teresa on giving
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"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 on aid and assistance   

"To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it."

Mother Teresa on aid and assistance
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"I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much."

Mother Teresa on god
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"There is hunger for ordinary bread, and there is hunger for love, for kindness, for thoughtfulness; and this is the great poverty that makes people suffer so much."

Mother Teresa on hunger
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"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 on jesus christ
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"There is but one love of Jesus, as there is but one person in the poor -- Jesus. We take vows of chastity to love Christ with undivided love; to be able to love him with undivided love we take a vow of poverty which frees us from all material possessions, and with that freedom we can love him with undivided love, and from this vow of undivided love we surrender ourselves totally to him in the person who takes his place."

Mother Teresa on jesus christ
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"Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls. A joyful heart is the inevitable result of a heart burning with love"

Mother Teresa on joy
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"If you judge people, you have no time to love them."

Mother Teresa on judgment and judges
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"Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless."

Mother Teresa on kindness
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"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 eyes, kindness in your smile."

Mother Teresa on kindness
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"When Christ said: I was hungry and you fed me, he didn't mean only the hunger for bread and for food; he also meant the hunger to be loved. Jesus himself experienced this loneliness. He came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept on hurting him. The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that's real hunger."

Mother Teresa on loneliness
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"In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love"

Mother Teresa on love
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"Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do... but how much love we put in that action."

Mother Teresa on love
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"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 on love   

"I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love."

Mother Teresa on love
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"Do not think that love in order to be genuine has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired. Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies."

Mother Teresa on love
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"As each Sister is to become a Co-Worker of Christ in the slums, each ought to understand what God and the Missionaries of Charity expect from her. Let Christ radiate and live his life in her and through her in the slums. Let the poor, seeing her, be drawn to Christ and invite him to enter their homes and their lives. Let the sick and suffering find in her a real angel of comfort and consolation. Let the little ones of the streets cling to her because she reminds them of him, the friend of the little ones."

Mother Teresa on missionaries   

"If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other."

Mother Teresa on peace
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"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 on peace
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"Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty."

Mother Teresa on poverty and the poor
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"Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them."

Mother Teresa on poverty and the poor
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"One filled with joy preaches without preaching."

Mother Teresa on preachers and preaching
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"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 on reform   

"The trouble is that rich people, well-to-do people, very often don't really know who the poor are; and that is why we can forgive them, for knowledge can only lead to love, and love to service. And so, if they are not touched by them, it's because they do not know them."

Mother Teresa on riches   

"Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own."

Mother Teresa on riches   

"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 on saints   

"If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one."

Mother Teresa on service
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"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 on silence
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"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 on smile
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"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 on suffering   

"One must really have suffered oneself to help others."

Mother Teresa on suffering
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"So many signatures for such a small heart."

Mother Teresa on bureaucracy   

"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 on charity   

"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."

Mother Teresa on sympathy
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"We can not do great things. We can only do little things with great love."

Mother Teresa on things and little things
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"Many people mistake our work for our vocation. Our vocation is the love of Jesus."

Mother Teresa on vocation
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"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 on vocation   

"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 on wealth