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Abortion
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The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.
-Mother Theresa
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Action(s)
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There should be less talk; a preaching point is not a meeting point. What do you do then? Take a broom and clean someone's house. That says enough.
-Mother Theresa
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Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
-Mother Theresa
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Advice
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The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.
-Mother Theresa
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Bureaucracy
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So many signatures for such a small heart.
-Mother Theresa
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Career, Vocation
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Many people mistake our work for our vocation. Our vocation is the love of Jesus.
-Mother Theresa
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Sweetest Lord, make me appreciative of the dignity of my high vocation, and its many responsibilities. Never permit me to disgrace it by giving way to coldness, unkindness, or impatience.
-Mother Theresa
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Charity
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It's not how much we give but how much love we put into giving.
-Mother Theresa
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We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But if that drop was not in the ocean, I think the ocean would be less because of that missing drop. I do not agree with the big way of doing things.
-Mother Theresa
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Christianity
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I believe in person to person. Every person is Christ for me, and since there is only one Jesus, that person is the one person in the world at that moment.
-Mother Theresa
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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.
-Mother Theresa
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Conflict
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Jesus taught us how to forgive out of love, how to forget out of humility. So let us examine our hearts and see if there is any unforgiven hurt -- any unforgotten bitterness! It is easy to love those who are far away. It isn't always easy to love those who are right next to us. It is easier to offer food to the hungry than to answer the lonely suffering of someone who lacks love right in one
-Mother Theresa
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Evangelism
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As each Sister is to become a Co-Worker of Christ in the slums, each ought to understand what God and the Missionaries of Charity expect from her. Let Christ radiate and live his life in her and through her in the slums. Let the poor, seeing her, be drawn to Christ and invite him to enter their homes and their lives. Let the sick and suffering find in her a real angel of comfort and consolation. Let the little ones of the streets cling to her because she reminds them of him, the friend of the little ones.
-Mother Theresa
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One filled with joy preaches without preaching.
-Mother Theresa
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Food
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There is hunger for ordinary bread, and there is hunger for love, for kindness, for thoughtfulness; and this is the great poverty that makes people suffer so much.
-Mother Theresa
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God
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I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much.
-Mother Theresa
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Greatness & Great Things
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There are no great things, only small things with great love. Happy are those.
-Mother Theresa
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Help
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Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace. Money will come if we seek first the Kingdom of God --the rest will be given.
-Mother Theresa
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To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it.
-Mother Theresa
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Joy, Excitement
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Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls. A joyful heart is the inevitable result of a heart burning with love
-Mother Theresa
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Kindness
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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.
-Mother Theresa
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Loneliness
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When Christ said: I was hungry and you fed me, he didn't mean only the hunger for bread and for food; he also meant the hunger to be loved. Jesus himself experienced this loneliness. He came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept on hurting him. The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that's real hunger.
-Mother Theresa
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Love
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Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do... but how much love we put in that action.
-Mother Theresa
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I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn't touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.
-Mother Theresa
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I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.
-Mother Theresa
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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.
-Mother Theresa
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If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
-Mother Theresa
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The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.
-Mother Theresa
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Peace
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If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
-Mother Theresa
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Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so that children have very little time for their parents. Parents have very little time for each other, and in the home begins the disruption of peace of the world.
-Mother Theresa
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Poverty
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Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.
-Mother Theresa
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Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them.
-Mother Theresa
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Prayer
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More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.
-Mother Theresa
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Reform, Correction
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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.
-Mother Theresa
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Saint, Saints
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We must have a real living determination to reach holiness. I will be a saint means I will despoil myself of all that is not God; I will strip my heart of all created things; I will live in poverty and detachment; I will renounce my will, my inclinations, my whims and fancies, and make myself a willing slave to the will of God.
-Mother Theresa
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Service
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If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.
-Mother Theresa
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Silence
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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.
-Mother Theresa
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Smile
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Smile at each other, smile at your wife, smile at your husband, smile at your children, smile at each other -- it doesn't matter who it is -- and that will help you to grow up in greater love for each other.
-Mother Theresa
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Suffering
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Without out suffering, our work would just be social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, not part of the Redemption. All the desolation of the poor people, not only their material poverty, but their spiritual destitution, must be redeemed. And we must share it, for only by being one with them can we redeem them by bringing God into their lives and bringing them to God.
-Mother Theresa
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One must really have suffered oneself to help others.
-Mother Theresa
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Sympathy
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Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.
-Mother Theresa
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Wealth
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There must be a reason why some people can afford to live well. They must have worked for it. I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things that we could use.
-Mother Theresa
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The trouble is that rich people, well-to-do people, very often don't really know who the poor are; and that is why we can forgive them, for knowledge can only lead to love, and love to service. And so, if they are not touched by them, it's because they do not know them.
-Mother Theresa
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Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.
-Mother Theresa
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Words
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Kind words may be short... but their echoes are endless.
-Mother Theresa
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Work
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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.
-Mother Theresa
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Books by and about Mother Theresa
