Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa
Mother Teresaalso known as Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, MC, was an Albanian Roman Catholic nun and missionary. She was born in Skopje, then part of the Kosovo Vilayet in the Ottoman Empire. After having lived in Macedonia for eighteen years, she moved to Ireland and then to India, where she lived for most of her life...
NationalityAlbanian
ProfessionReligious Leader
Date of Birth26 August 1910
CitySkopje, Macedonia
CountryAlbania
Life is not worth living unless it is lived for others.
Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do it to me.
I was asked why I did not give a rod with which to fish, in the hands of the poor, rather than give the fish itself as this makes them remain poor. So I told them: The people whom we pick up are not able to stand with a rod. So today I will give them fish and when they are able to stand, then I shall send them to you and you can give them the rod. That is your job. Let me do my work today.
When I pick up a person from the street, hungry, I give him a plate of rice, a piece of bread. But a person who is shut out, who feels unwanted, unloved, terrified, the person who has been thrown out of society - that spiritual poverty is much harder to overcome. And abortion, which often follows from contraception, brings a people to be spiritually poor, and that is the worst poverty and the most difficult to overcome.
I have never been in a war before, but I have seen famine and death. I was asking (myself) what do they feel when they do this? I don't understand it. They are all children of God. Why do they do it. I don't understand.
The poor give us much more than we give them. They're such strong people, living day to day with no food. And they never curse, never complain. We don't have to give them pity or sympathy. We have so much to learn from them.
Abortion is profoundly anti-women.
Dealing with the media is more difficult that bathing a leper
We need to realize that poverty doesn't only consist of being hungry for bread, but rather it is a tremendous hunger for human dignity. We need to love and to be someone for someone else
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.
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.
Everybody has something good inside them. Some hide it, some neglect it, but it is there
Once that living love is destroyed by contraception, abortion follows very easily.
Love has no meaning if it isn't shared. We have been created for greater things - to love and to be loved... To love a person without any conditions, without any expectations. Small things, done in great love, bring joy and peace. To love, it is necessary to give. To give, it is necessary to be free from selfishness.