Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Mother Teresa Quotes



     This book was absolutely amazing and I happened to read it during Lent... which totally transformed my Lent. "In this time of Lent, the time of greater love, when we look at all that Jesus chose to suffer out of love for us, to redeem us, let us pray for all the grace we need to unite our sufferings to His, that many souls, who live in darkness and misery, may know His love and life." (p. 325)
     Basically I learned about how God loves and wants to be loved, how we can love and be loved by God and others. I learned that my "imperfect" life is really perfect and how to offer suffering for God. When Mother Teresa taught a sick man how to offer his suffering in love, he died shortly after but said before dying "I wish I had more time to suffer now that I know how to suffer for God." And I'm happy I learned this early in my life and still have time to suffer. ;)
    

Here are some of my favorite quotes:
  • I used to get goose bumps at the thought of suffering - but now I embrace suffering even before it actually comes, and like this Jesus and I live in love. p. 20
  • That is the most important - to suffer and to laugh. p. 24
  • Now I really rejoice when something does not go as I wish - because I see that He wants our trust - that is why in this loss let us praise God as if we have got everything. p. 24
  • When I see someone sad, I always think, she is refusing something to Jesus. p. 33
  • "The strong grace of Divine Light and Love Mother [Teresa] received on the train journey to Darjeeling on 10th September 1946 is where the Missionaries of Charity begins - in the depths of God's infinite longing to love and to be loved." p. 41
  • "I thirst" is something much deeper than just Jesus saying "I love you." Until you know deep inside that Jesus thirsts for you - you can't begin to know who He wants to be for you. Or who He wants you to be for Him. p. 42
  • I know you are afraid for me. You are afraid that the whole thing [starting her congregation] will be a failure. - What about it? Is it not worth going through every possible suffering just for one single soul? Did not Our Lord do the same: what a failure was His Cross on Calvary - and all for me, a sinner. p. 65
  • By nature I am sensistive, love beautiful and nice things, comfort and all the comfort can give - to be loved and love. - I know that the life of a Missionary of Charity - will be minus all these. The complete poverty, the Indian life, the life of the poorest will mean a hard toil against my great self love. Yet, Your Grace, I am longing with a true, sincere heart to begin to lead this kind of life - so as to bring joy to the suffering Heart of Jesus. p. 66
  • How often, how very often He [Jesus] complained of delays - for whenever He asks for something, He says, people get extra careful about many things - but if the world asks the things are done so quickly. p. 81
  • The less we have of our own, the more we shall have to give - for love founded on sacrifice is sure to grow. p. 93
  • [Words of Jesus] My little one - come - come - carry Me into the holes of the poor. - Come be My light. - I cannot go alone - they don't know Me - so they don't want Me. You come - go amongst them, carry Me with you into them. - How I long to enter their holes - their dark unhappy homes. Come be their victim. - In your immolation - in your love for Me - they will see Me, know Me, want Me. Offer more sacrifices - smile more tenderly, pray more fervently and all the difficulties will disappear. p. 98
  • I felt my own poverty there too - for I had nothing to give that poor woman. - I did everything I could but if I had been able to give her a hot cup of milk or something like that, her cold body would have got some life. p. 132
  • Our work for souls is great, but without much penance and much sacrifice it will be impossible.- We have to do much more penance than even the Carmelites because of closeness of sin. p. 141
  • (From her spiritual director:) "For sufferings you have not to look for them. Almighty God provides for them daily: they are not always what we imagined, bodily sufferings and the sort, but interior sufferings, contradictions, failures of our plan, anxieties for the community, for the work, misunderstandings in our relations with other religious, or families; oppositions unexpected at times, etc." p. 142
  • I want to become a saint, by satiating the thirst of Jesus for love and souls. - And there is another big desire - to give the Mother Church many a saint from our Society. p. 144
  • Be kind to each other. I prefer you make mistakes in kindness - than that you work miracles in unkindness. Be kind in words. - See what the kindness of Our Lady brought to her, see how she spoke. - She could have easily told St. Joseph of the Angel's message - yet she never uttered a word. - And then God Himself interfered. She kept all these [things] in her heart. p. 196
  • I do not believe, Father, in that continual digging into one's spiritual life - by long and frequent visits and talks. The help you have given me - will carry me for a long time. - Our spiritual life must remain simple - so as to be able to understand the mind of our poor. p. 215
  • My dear children - without our 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. - Jesus wanted to help us by sharing our life, our loneliness, our agony and death. p. 220
  • People today are hungry for love, for understanding love which is much greater and which is the only answer to loneliness and great poverty. p. 233
  • We too must experience poverty if we want to be true carriers of God's love. To be able to proclaim the Good News to the poor we must know what is poverty. p. 234
  • Thank God we don't serve God with our feelings, otherwise I don't know where I would be. - Pray for me. p. 255
  • That's the most beautiful part of God, eh? Being almighty, and yet not forcing Himself on anyone. p. 260
  • I make my holy hour with jesus straight after Mass - so that I get the 2 hours with Jesus before people and Sisters start using me. - I let Him use me first. p. 270
  • God cannot fill what is full. - He can fill only emptiness - deep poverty - and your "Yes" is the beginning of being or becoming empty...Take away your eyes from your self and rejoice that you have nothing - that you are nothing - that you can do nothing. Give Jesus a big smile - each time your nothingness frightens you. - p. 275
  • Pray - I must be able to give only Jesus to the world. People are hungry for God. What [a] terrible meeting [it] would be with our neighbour if we give them only ourselves. p. 281
  • We could maybe have adoration everyday and so bring and weave our lives with the Bread of Life. - No greater love not even God could give than in giving Himself as Bread of Life - to be broken, to be eaten so that you and I may eat and live - maybe eat and so satisfy our hunger for love. - And He seemed yet not satisfied for He too was hungry for love. - So He made Himself the Hungry One, the Thirsty One, the Naked One, the Homeless and kept on calling - I was hungry, naked, homeless. You did it to me. - The Bread of Life and the Hungry One - but one love - Only Jesus. His humility is so wonderful. I can understand His majesty, His greatness because He is God - but His humility is beyond my understanding, because He makes Himself Bread of Life so that even a child as small as I can eat Him and live. - Some days back - when giving Holy Communion to our Sisters in the Mother house, suddenly I realized I was holding God between my 2 fingers. The greatness of [the] humility of God. Really no greater love - no greater love than the love of Christ. p. 283
  • We have no right to refuse our lives to others in whom we contact Christ... Let the poor and the people eat you up... let the people "bite" your smile, your time. p. 285
  • We are not social workers. We are contemplatives in the heart of the world. We are 24 hours a day with Jesus. p. 286
  • Many people are very, very concerned with children in India, with the children of Africa where quite a number die, maybe of malnutrition, of hunger and so on, but millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today. p. 292
  • I find the unborn child to be the poorest of the poor today - the most unloved - the most unwanted, the throw away of society. p. 293
  • Do we know who our own poor are? Do we know our neighbor, the poor of our own area? It is so easy for us to talk and talk about the poor of other places. Very often we have the suffering, we have the lonely, we have the people - old, unwanted, feeling miserable - and they are near us and we don't even know them. We have no time to smile at them. p. 296
  • Our poor people are great people, a very lovable people. They don't need our pity and sympathy. They need our understanding love and they need our respect. We need to tell the poor that they are somebody to us, that they, too, have been created, by the same loving hand of God, to love and to be loved. p. 296
  • Remember - love begins at home - our community - our family. p. 314
  • The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace. p. 315
  • I pray that nothing may ever fill you with pain and sorrow as to make you forget the joy of the Risen Jesus. p. 326

3 comments:

  1. interesting piece of information, I had come to know about your web-page from my friend pramod, jaipur,i have read atleast eight posts of yours by now, and let me tell you, your blog gives the best and the most interesting information. This is just the kind of information that i had been looking for, i'm already your rss reader now and i would regularly watch out for the new posts, once again hats off to you! Thanks a million once again, Regards, Mother Teresa Quotes On Women





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  2. Wow, I am so touched. Thank you Nandkishor. Thanks a million to you!

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