Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person. — Mother Teresa · Smartyfair

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Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person. — Mother Teresa · Smartyfair

Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.

Mother Teresa1910–1997 · humanitarian · 1900s Albania & IndiaMother Teresa was a Catholic nun who spent most of her life caring for the poorest and sickest people in Calcutta, India.7 quotes

Source not found yetCourage

In plain words

Do not wait to be told. Start helping, one person at a time.

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Where these words come from

How sure this is: 55% sureLots of sources credit Mother Teresa with this, and they agree with each other. The book or the speech it first came from hasn't turned up yet.
What turned up: Quoted in Mary Alice Warner & Dayna Beilenson, 'Women of Faith and Spirit' (1987), p. 42 — a secondary compilation published while she was alive (not posthumous), but not a primary transcript I could independently verify this session.
Work: Women of Faith and Spirit (Mary Alice Warner & Dayna Beilenson)
Occasion: 1987 · undated
Sources checked: en.wikiquote.orgChecked using claude-sonnet-5, 21 August 2026Wikiquote 1980s section, same citation

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More from Mother Teresa

Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.

More on courage

You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Marcus Aurelius

1900s

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.

Mother Teresa

I do not agree with a big way of doing things. What matters is the individual.

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

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.

Be kind to each other in your homes.

You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.

Rabindranath Tagore

Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.

For sometimes it is an act of bravery even to live.

If you see what is right and fail to act on it, you lack courage.

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

Marcus Aurelius