Mother Teresa Quotes

Here is some wisdom from Mother Teresa

"I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust
me so much."

"Let's concentrate on a worthwhile goal...That no child be unwanted, that no person

"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 a dish of rice to satisfy the hunger of a poor
person, than to fill up the loneliness and suffering of someone lacking love in our
own family."

"How can you love God whom you do not see, if you don't love the neighbor whom
you do see--the neighbor you know and live with every day?"

"The fruit of Silence is Prayer. The fruit of Prayer is Faith. The fruit of Faith is Love.
The fruit of Love is Service. The fruit of Service is Peace."

"The fullness of our heart is expressed in our eyes, in our touch, in what we write, in
what we say, in the way we walk, the way we receive, the way we need. That is the
fullness of our heart expressing itself in many different ways."

"Spread love everywhere you go: First of all in your own house. Give love to your
children, To your wife or husband, To your next door neighbor. Let no one come to
you without leaving better or happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness;
kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, and kindness in
your warm greeting."

Authors Details: Mother Teresa

1910-1997

Albanian missionary
Mother Teresa has dedicated her life to helping the poor, the sick, and the dying around the

world, particularly those in India.

Introduction

Mother Teresa is among the most well-known and highly respected women in the world in

the latter half of the twentieth century. In 1948 she founded a religious order of nuns in

Calcutta, India, called the Missionaries of Charity. Through this order, she has dedicated her

life to helping the poor, the sick, and the dying around the world, particularly those in India.

Her selfless work with the needy has brought her much acclaim and many awards, including

the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

She was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910 in Skopje, Yugoslavia (what is now

Macedonia). Her parents, Nikola and Dronda Bojaxhiu, were Albanians who settled in Skopje

shortly after the beginning of the century. Since her father was co-owner of a construction

firm, her family lived comfortably while she was growing up. In 1928 she suddenly decided

to become a nun and traveled to Dublin, Ireland, to join the Sisters of Loreto, a religious

order founded in the seventeenth century. After studying at the convent for less than a year,

she left to join the Loreto convent in the city of Darjeeling in northeast India. On May 24,

1931, she took the name of "Teresa" in honor of St. Teresa of Lisieux.

In 1929 Mother Teresa had been assigned to teach geography at St. Mary's High School for

Girls in Calcutta, south of Darjeeling. At the time, the streets of Calcutta were crowded with

beggars, lepers, and the homeless. Unwanted infants were regularly left to die on the streets

or in garbage bins. On a train back to Darjeeling in 1946, Mother Teresa felt the need to

abandon her position at St. Mary's to care for the needy in the slums of Calcutta. After

receiving the consent of her archbishop, she began her work.

Founds the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta

In 1948 Pope Pius XII granted Mother Teresa permission to live as an independent nun. That

same year, she became an Indian citizen. After studying nursing for three months with the

American Medical Missionaries in the Indian city of Patna, she returned to Calcutta to found

the Missionaries of Charity. For her habit she chose a plain white sari with a blue border and

a simple cross pinned to her left shoulder.

to read and how to care for themselves. In 1949 she was joined by her first recruit, a young

girl from the city of Bengal. Many of those who joined her order over the next few years were

former students from St. Mary's. Each recruit was required to devote her life to serving the

poor without accepting any material reward in return.

In 1952 Mother Teresa began work for which the Missionaries of Charity has been noted ever

since. Her order received permission from Calcutta officials to use a portion of the abandoned

temple to the goddess Kali, the Hindu goddess of death and destruction. Here Mother Teresa

founded the Kalighat Home for the Dying. She and her fellow nuns gathered dying Indians off

the streets of Calcutta and brought them to this home to care for them during the days

before they died.

Establishes a Leper Colony

In the mid-1950s, Mother Teresa began to help victims of leprosy. The Indian government

gave the Missionaries of Charity a 34-acre plot of land near the city of Asansol. Under Mother

Teresa's guidance, a leper colony was established here, called Shanti Nagar (Town of Peace).

For her work among the people of India, the Indian government gave her the Padmashree

("Magnificent Lotus") Award in September of 1962.

In 1965 Pope Paul VI placed the Missionaries of Charity directly under the control of the

papacy (the office of the pope). He also authorized Mother Teresa to expand the order

outside of India. Centers to treat lepers, the blind, the disabled, the aged, and the dying

were soon opened worldwide, including one in Rome in 1968. Mother Teresa also organized

schools and orphanages for the poor. The Brothers of Charity, the male companion to the

Sisters of Charity, was formed in the mid-1960s to run the homes for the dying.

Receives Nobel Peace Prize

In 1971 Pope Paul VI honored Mother Teresa by awarding her the first Pope John XXIII Peace

Prize. The following year the government of India presented her with the Jawaharlal Nehru

Award for International Understanding. In 1979 she received her greatest award, the Nobel

Peace Prize. Mother Teresa accepted all of these awards on behalf of the poor, using any

money that accompanied them to fund her centers. By 1990 over 3,000 nuns belonged to

the Missionaries of Charity, running centers in 25 countries.

for AIDS patients in San Francisco, California. In 1991 she returned home to Albania and

opened a home in Tirana, the capital. At this time, there were 168 homes operating in India.

Later in 1995, plans materialized to open homes in China.

In the 1980s and 1990s Mother Teresa's health problems became a concern. She suffered a

heart attack while visiting Pope John Paul II in 1983. She had a near fatal heart attack in

1989 and began wearing a pacemaker.

In August 1996 the world prayed for Mother Teresa's recovery. At the age of 86, Mother

Teresa was on a respirator in a hospital, suffering from heart failure and malaria. Doctors

were not sure she would recover. Within days she was fully conscious, asked to receive

communion, and requested that the doctors send her home. When she was sent home a few

weeks later in early September, a doctor said she firmly believed, "God will take care of me."

In late November of that same year, Mother Teresa was again hospitalized. She had

angioplasty surgery to clear two blocked arteries. She was also given a mild electric shock to

correct an irregular heartbeat. She was released after spending almost a month in the

hospital.

In March 1997, after an eight week selection process, 63-year-old Sister Nirmala was named

as the new leader of the Missionaries of Charity. Although Mother Teresa had been trying to

cut back on her duties for some time (because of her health problems), she stayed on in an

advisory role to Sister Nirmala.

In April 1997 filming began on the movie Mother Teresa: In the Name of God's Poor with

actress Geraldine Chaplin playing the title role. The movie aired in the fall of 1997 on "The

Family Channel" even though, after viewing the movie, Mother Teresa refused to endorse it.

Mother Teresa celebrated her 87th birthday in August, and died shortly thereafter of a heart

attack on September 5, 1997. The world grieved her loss and one mourner noted, "It was

Mother herself who poor people respected. When they bury her, we will have lost something

that cannot be replaced."

In appearance Mother Teresa was both tiny (only about five feet tall) and energetic. Her face

was quite wrinkled, but her dark eyes commanded attention, radiating an energy and

intelligence that shone without expressing nervousness or impatience. Many of her recruits
came from people attracted by her own aura of sanctity, and she seemed little changed by

the worldwide attention she received. Conservatives within the Catholic Church sometimes

used her as a symbol of traditional religious values that they felt lacking in their churches. By

popular consensus she was a saint for the times, and a spate of almost adoring books and

articles started to canonize her in the 1980s and well into the 1990s. She herself tried to

deflect all attention away from what she did to either the works of her group or to the god

who was her inspiration. She continued to combine energetic administrative activities with a

demanding life of prayer, and if she accepted opportunities to publicize her work they had

little of the cult of personality about them.

In the wake of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Peace she received many other international honors,

but she sometimes disconcerted humanitarian groups by expressing her horror at abortion or

her own preference for prayer rather than politics. When asked what would happen to her

group and work after her death, she told people that God would surely provide a successor

— a person humbler and more faithful than she. The Missionaries of Charity, who had

brothers as well as sisters by the mid-1980s, are guided by the constitution she wrote for

them. They have their vivid memories of the love for the poor that created the phenomenon

of Mother Teresa in the first place. So the final part of her story will be the lasting impact her

memory has on the next generations of missionaries, as well as in the world as a whole.