When asked which commandment is the most important, Jesus replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: Love your neighbor as yourself. The entire law is based on these two commandments.” Indeed living according to these two commandments will prevent you from breaking any of the other commandments.
Mother Theresa epitomized those two commandments almost perfectly. I only say almost because, of course, she was human and made mistakes. However, to the outsider looking at her life, she almost completely performed them very well.
She was a teacher of upper income family children for the beginning part of her life. However, one day she came upon a poor man from one of the bottom layers of the caste system in India. The man was dying. Defying the “rules” of the caste system, she had mercy and compassion for the man. You see, the caste system says that the poor are poor because of something bad they did earlier in their life or even in a prior life. Therefore, they deserve to be poor now and shouldn’t be helped. Nevertheless, Mother Theresa helped the man and he ended up dying in her arms. She vowed to help other people like this man die with dignity while being cared for by somebody else. She thought that nobody should have to die of a disease all alone. She started her famous hospice ministry to prevent travesties like this from happening in the future.
She wanted to live caring deeply for her neighbor and she did just that for the rest of her life. Her neighbors were anyone else besides herself.
Here are 20 loving quotes credited to Mother Theresa:
In this life we cannot do great things; we can only do small things with great love.
Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.
Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier.
Intense love does not measure, it just gives.
Let us always meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.
Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be gotten, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go.
Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do…but how much love we put in that action.
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.
If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.
The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.
Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.
Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.
Love to be real, it must cost—it must hurt—it must empty us of self.
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted accounting to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.
Joy is prayer, joy is strength, joy is love, joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.
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.
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.
I’m a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world.
Go out into the world today and love the people you meet. Let your presence light new light in the hearts of people.
May these inspiring quotes help you to show love to someone else. Maybe even today.
