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 be loved.
Mother TeresaWe pick up people dying full of worms from the street. We have picked up more than 40,000 of them. If I lift up such a person, clean him, love him and serve him, is it conversion? He has been there like an animal in the street but I am giving him love and he dies peacefully. That peace comes from his heart. That's between him and God.
Mother TeresaThe greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty -- it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.
Mother Teresa