Mother Teresa will be canonized this weekend.
I’m so excited!
To celebrate, I thought I’d share with you some beautiful Mother Teresa quotes with you.
I’ve organized them into categories so that if you want to find something specific to share with your kids to teach a virtue, you can do so. I hope that helps you out.
Enjoy!
Mother Teresa Quotes
On Love
Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier.
Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired.
I am not sure exactly what heaven will be like, but I don’t 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?
I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.
If we want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.
In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.
Intense love does not measure, it just gives.
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
There are no great things, only small things with great love. Happy are those.
Love is a fruit in season at all times and within reach of every hand.
There is more hunger in the world for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.
The success of love is in the loving – it is not in the result of loving. Of course it is natural in love to want the best for the other person, but whether it turns out that way or not does not determine the value of what we have done.
It is not the magnitude of our actions but the amount of love that is put into them that matters.
If we really want to love we must learn how to forgive.
On Joy
The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.
Profound joy of the heart is like a magnet that indicates the path of life.
A joyful heart is the normal result of a heart burning with love. She gives most who gives with joy.
Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.
It is impossible to walk rapidly and be unhappy.
One filled with joy preaches without preaching.
Joy is prayer. Joy is strength. Joy is love. The best way to show my gratitude to God is to accept everything, even my problems, with joy. Never let anything so fill you with sorrow as to make you forget for one moment the joy of Christ risen.
On Peace
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
Peace begins with a smile.
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.
On Kindness
Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.
I would rather make mistakes in kindness and compassion than work miracles in unkindness and hardness.
On Faith
Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.
I do not pray for success, I ask for faithfulness.
I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.
On Humbleness
If you are humble nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are.
On Smiling
We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.
Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.
Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.
On Hope
We want to create hope for the person … we must give hope, always hope.
On Giving
We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.
Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go.
If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.
On Communicating
I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.
We are all pencils in the hand of God.
Words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.
On Family
Love begins by taking care of the closest ones – the ones at home.
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.
Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do… but how much love we put in that action.
On the Poor, Needy, and Downtrodden
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.
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.
It is a kingly act to assist the fallen.
Each one of them is Jesus in disguise.
Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.
The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.
It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.
Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.
The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.
The poor do not need our sympathy and our pity. The poor need our love and compassion.
On God
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.
On Prayer
Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift of Himself.
Prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at His disposition, and listening to His voice in the depth of our hearts.
Prayer is the mortar that holds our house together.
Prayer makes your heart bigger, until it is capable of containing the gift of God himself. Prayer begets faith, faith begets love, and love begets service on behalf of poor.
The Simple Path,
Silence is Prayer,
Prayer is Faith,
Faith is Love,
Love is Service,
The Fruit of Service is Peace.
On Work
There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in – that we do it to God, to Christ, and that’s why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.
We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
Good works are links that form a chain of love.
God doesn’t require us to succeed, He only requires that you try.
On Life
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.
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.
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.
Some people come in your life as blessings. Some come in your life as lessons.
Life is an opportunity, benefit from it.
Life is beauty, admire it.
Life is a dream, realize it.
Life is a challenge, meet it.
Life is a duty, complete it.
Life is a game, play it.
Life is a promise, fulfill it.
Life is sorrow, overcome it.
Life is a song, sing it.
Life is struggle, accept it.
Life is tragedy, confront it.
Life is an adventure, dare it.
Life is luck, make it.
Life is too precious, do not destroy it.
Life is life, fight for it.
I hope these Mother Teresa quotes blessed you! Feel free to share them. Let’s spread this saintly lady’s words of wisdom around the world!
Tracy Bua Smith says
Hi Susan! Beautiful post and quotes! I linked up to this post on my post about how we had an (early) celebration for Mother Teresa’s canonization! 🙂 http://www.asliceofsmithlife.com/2016/09/how-our-family-celebrated-canonization.html
Susan Brown says
Great! Thanks so much! I love how your family celebrated.