If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
Use itGS4: judging people crowds out compassion; empathy in public service.
Quotes / Thinkers / Mother Teresa
Thinker · 11 quotes
Mother Teresa quotes for UPSC
11 sourced quotes by Mother Teresa on compassion & empathy, duty & responsibility, peace, non-violence & conflict, relationships & friendship, with a use case for each in GS4, Essay and interviews.
✓ Attributions checked against Wikiquote's sourced list
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
— Mother TeresaMary Alice Warner, Dayna Beilenson (1987) Women of faith and spirit: their words & thoughts, p. 42
Use itGS4: individual action without waiting for leaders; citizen initiative.
The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.
— Mother TeresaInterview by Edward W. Desmond in TIME magazine (4 December 1989)
Use itEssay on poverty: emotional deprivation and need for love beyond material hunger.
The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.
— Mother TeresaAs quoted by Malcolm Muggeridge in Something Beautiful for God (1971)
Use itEssay/GS1 on loneliness and social exclusion: being unwanted as the worst disease.
Don't look for big things, just do small things with great love....The smaller the thing, the greater must be our love.
— Mother TeresaAs quoted in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (2007) by Brian Kolodiejchuk
Use itLife/GS4: small things done with great love.
We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But if the drop was not in the ocean, I think the ocean would be less because of the missing drop.
— Mother TeresaAs quoted in Mother Teresa's Reaching Out In Love - Stories told by Mother Teresa, Compiled and Edited by Edward Le Joly and Jaya Chaliha, B
Use itGS4/Life: every small contribution matters; drop in the ocean.
I do not agree with a big way of doing things. What matters is the individual. If we wait till we get numbers, then we will be lost in the numbers and we will never be able to show that love and respect for the person.
— Mother TeresaAs quoted in Mother Teresa's Reaching Out In Love - Stories told by Mother Teresa, Compiled and Edited by Edward Le Joly and Jaya Chaliha, B
Use itGS4: dignity of the individual over numbers in welfare delivery.
Be kind to each other in your homes. Be kind to those who surround you. I prefer that you make mistakes in kindness rather than that you work miracles in unkindness. Often just for one word, one look, one quick action, and darkness fills the heart of the one we love.
— Mother TeresaQuoted in: Charlotte Gray. Mother Teresa: Her Mission to Serve God by Caring for the Poor. G. Stevens, (1988), p. 53
Use itGS4: kindness in everyday conduct; better a mistake in kindness than a miracle in unkindness.
We are called upon not to be successful, but to be faithful.
— Mother TeresaTo Navin Chawla, her authorized biographer, as reported in a speech of tribute delivered at UNESCO on the centenary of her birthday, in Pari
Use itGS4: faithfulness to duty over success; process over outcome.
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
— Mother TeresaMother Teresa Reflects on Working Toward Peace, (essay, Santa Clara University, retrieved August 2012)
Use itEssay on peace: we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
Love begins at home. And love to be true has to hurt.
— Mother Teresa1979 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech
Use itLife: love begins at home and demands sacrifice.