Mother Teresa
The Missionaries of Charity, the religious congregation Mother Teresa founded, stands as the central institutional achievement of her life as a missionary and religious sister.
Born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on 26 August 1910 in Skopje, she held citizenship over the course of her life under the Ottoman Empire, in Albania, and in India. She worked as a nun, religious sister, and missionary, and used multiple languages across her life and work, among them English, Hindi, Bangla, and Slovene. She died on 5 September 1997 in Kolkata.
The recognition she received during her lifetime included the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Order of Merit, the Order of the British Empire, the Padma Shri, and the Bharat Ratna. The Missionaries of Charity, which she established as a formal institution, remained the concrete organizational expression of her decades of work as a missionary and religious sister in India.
Quotes by Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa's insights on:
You weren’t created just to consume resources, you were put on this Earth to make a contribution.
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.
Our poverty is freedom. This is our poverty – the giving up our freedom to dispose of things, to choose, to possess.
I realized that I had the call to take care of the sick and the dying, the hungry, the naked, the homeless – to be God’s Love in action to the poorest of the poor. That was the beginning of the Missionaries of Charity.
God loves me. I’m not here just to fill a place, just to be a number. He has chosen me for a purpose. I know it.
What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more. If you can’t feed a hundred people, then just feed one.
We don’t need bombs and guns to destroy, to bring peace – just get together, love one another, bring that peace, that joy, that strength of presence of each other in the home. And we will be able to overcome all the evil that is in the world.
Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that’s real hunger.