Inspirations

Mother Teresa

The quotes everyone shares, checked against what she actually said.

By Travis Hellstrom ·

Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born in Skopje on August 26, 1910. At 18 she left home to join the Sisters of Loreto, and in 1929 she arrived in India, where she taught at a Loreto school in Calcutta for close to twenty years. On September 10, 1946, on a train to Darjeeling, she felt what she later called “the call within the call”: to leave the convent and live among the poor.

In 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity. Two years later she turned an abandoned Hindu temple into Nirmal Hriday, a home where the poorest people in Calcutta could die cared for. The order grew to work in more than 130 countries. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, died in Calcutta on September 5, 1997, was given a state funeral by India, and was declared a saint in 2016. Her private letters, published ten years after her death as Come Be My Light, showed that for decades she felt God was absent. She kept going anyway.

She is also one of the most quoted people on the internet, and a lot of lines carry her name that she never said. So the twenty Mother Teresa quotes readers like most on Goodreads were each checked against the books of her own words (her talks, letters and instructions to her sisters, gathered by the people who worked with her) and her Nobel lecture. Fourteen of the twenty are hers: ten almost exactly as she said them, three in slightly different words (shown here as she said them, with the popular version underneath), and one as people remembered her saying it. Each one has the book or talk it comes from. The other six aren’t found in anything she said or wrote; they’re at the bottom of the page.

Her words, with sources

  • We can do no great things — only small things with great love.From Life in the Spirit (1983), edited by Kathryn Spink. She said it in her Nobel lecture too: “not in big things, but in small things with great love.”Usually shared as Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love, a wording that turns up only years after her death.
  • Let us not use bombs and guns to overcome the world. Let us use love and compassion. Peace begins with a smile.From Life in the Spirit (1983).
  • Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.From In the Heart of the World (1997), edited by Becky Benenate. An older form is in her letters: “yesterday has gone, tomorrow has not yet come, and we have only today to make Him known, loved, and served” (Total Surrender, 1985).
  • Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.From The Best Gift Is Love (1993), a book of her meditations.
  • 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.Two passages from Heart of Joy (1987), edited by José Luis González-Balado. The popular version joins them.
  • 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…From A Gift for God (1975), her prayers and meditations.
  • If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.From Love: A Fruit Always in Season (1989), edited by Dorothy S. Hunt.
  • As people remembered itWhat can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.Her answer when she was asked what people could do for world peace, as told in Arthur Fay Sueltz’s Life at Close Quarters (1982). It isn’t in her own books, but her Nobel lecture says the same thing: “I want you to find the poor here, right in your own home first. And begin love there.”
  • It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the action that we do.From her Nobel lecture, December 11, 1979.Usually shared as It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving, the way Joan Graff Clucas’s 1989 biography of her has it.
  • At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done. We will be judged by “I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was naked and you clothed me, I was homeless and you took me in.”From Words to Love By (1983).
  • God has not called me to be successful. He called me to be faithful.From My Life for the Poor (1985). Time quoted her saying it in 1980.Often misquoted as God doesn’t require us to succeed, he only requires that you try, which first appears in 1993.
  • The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love.From A Simple Path (1995). She was saying it as early as 1971, in Malcolm Muggeridge’s Something Beautiful for God: “The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted…”
  • These are the few ways we can practice humility: To speak as little as possible of one’s self. To mind one’s own business. … To choose always the hardest.From a longer list in Jesus, the Word to Be Spoken (1986), edited by Angelo Devananda, and in The Joy in Loving (1997). The popular version leaves out one of her lines, just before the last: “To yield in discussion even though one is right.”
  • The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.From her interview with Edward W. Desmond in Time, December 4, 1989, talking about the loneliness of the rich.

Credited to her, but not found in her words

These lines are everywhere with her name on them, and some of them sound like her. None of them turns up in her books, letters, talks or Nobel lecture, and none comes with a source.

  • If you judge people, you have no time to love them.Goodreads’ most-liked Mother Teresa quote. It has been passed around since at least the 1980s, in yearbooks and quotation books. The nearest thing in her own words is in A Simple Path (1995): “Try not to judge people. If you judge others then you are not giving love.”
  • I am not sure exactly what heaven will be like, but I 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?’It turns up only after her death, in Christian quotation books from around 2000. The idea is hers, said more simply in her Nobel lecture.
  • Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.In circulation from the late 1980s on.
  • The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.In print from 1993 on, usually ending “unwanted.” She said something close: see the greatest disease in the West.
  • I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.In print from 1998 on.
  • Never travel faster than your guardian angel can fly.An old saying, usually “Don’t drive faster than your guardian angel can fly,” found on bumper stickers and driving-school ads.
  • Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest you.Not in the top twenty, but a favorite. It first shows up in 2004. What she said, in Words to Love By (1983): “I never look at the masses as my responsibility. I look at the individual. I can love only one person at a time.”

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