Possessions: When you don’t have anything, then you have everything.
Poverty: We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.
Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.
The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty — it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.
Prayer: If we pray, we will believe; If we believe, we will love; If we love, we will serve.
Prayer is the mortar that holds our house together.
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.
Providence (of God): Seeking the face of God in everything, everyone, all the time, and his hand in every happening; This is what it means to be contemplative in the heart of the world.
Rosary, The: We can only learn love for Mary on our knees and through the rosary. Let us improve our praying of the rosary, and let us ask Mary to teach us how to pray as she taught Jesus in all the years he was with her in Nazareth. Our Lady is the mother of the church and our mother, a woman of purity, poverty, obedience, and charity. Bring Our Lady fully into your life at home and in the homes of the poor.
Self-Sacrifice: A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, and must empty ourselves. Give yourself fully to God. He will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that you believe much more in his love than in your weakness.
Silence / Contemplation: 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.
In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence.
We too are called to withdraw at certain intervals into deeper silence and aloneness with God, together as a community as well as personally; to be alone with Him — not with our books, thoughts, and memories but completely stripped of everything — to dwell lovingly in His presence, silent, empty, expectant, and motionless. We cannot find God in noise or agitation.
Smiles: Let us always meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.
We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.
Keep the corners of your mouth turned up.
Suffering: Pain and suffering have come into your life, but remember pain, sorrow, suffering are but the kiss of Jesus – a sign that you have come so close to Him that He can kiss you.
Suffering, Redemptive: Suffering is nothing by itself. But suffering shared with the passion of Christ is a wonderful gift, the most beautiful gift, a token of love.
Time: The future is so much in the hands of God, I find it much more easy to accept today because yesterday is gone and tomorrow has not come and I have only today.
Words: Words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.
Works, Good: In loving one another through our works we bring an increase of grace and a growth in divine love.
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.
The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.
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.
Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest you.
Work without love is slavery.
Worldliness: Yes, you must live life beautifully and not allow the spirit of the world that makes gods out of power, riches, and pleasure make you to forget that you have been created for greater things.
[the above quotations were checked to make sure they are not words falsely attributed to Mother Teresa]
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Meta Description: Collected quotations from St. Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa).
Meta Keywords: Mother Teresa, St. Teresa of Calcutta, Mother Teresa quotations
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