Mother Teresa was such a generous soul that when she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she refused the prize money of $192,000 and asked for it to be donated to the poor in India. On her birth anniversary read some inspiring quotes by the Saint.
Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, was an Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary. Born on August 26, 1910 to a family of ethnic Albanians in Skopje, Mother Teresa left her home for Irelands’s Rathfarnham at the age of 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto. She wanted to learn English in the hopes of becoming a missionary, and English was the language of instruction for the Sisters of Loreto in India.
Mother Teresa came to India in 1929, and after a period of teaching at St. Teresa’s School in Darjeeling, she took her first religious vows on 24 May 1931.She later went on to teach at a school in Kolkata, where she served for almost two decades. However, serving the poor and needy was Mother Teresa’s true calling and in 1948 she began her journey of serving the poor and the needy. In 1950 she founded the Roman Catholic religious congregation which later went on to be known as Missionaries of Charity. During her life Mother Teresa set up many homes for the poor, needy, those dying from AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis all over India, and according to 2013 reports Missionaries of Charity has expanded to 700 missions in 130 countries, providing aid and support to the needy and diseased.
Mother Teresa was such a generous soul that when she won the Nobel Peace Prize “for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which also constitutes a threat to peace” in 1979, she refused the prize money of $192,000 and asked for it to be donated to the poor in India. In 2017, she was posthumously canonized as a Patron Saint by the Vatican Pope for her service to the needy and poor.
On her birth anniversary, let us read some inspiring quotes by the Saint and hope we can imbibe some of her values. Read on:
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?
I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.
What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.
Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.
Love cannot remain by itself – it has no meaning. Love has to be put into action, and that action is service.
If you are humble nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are.
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.
Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.
We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.
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