Time & Perspective Quote by Mother Teresa

Judgment is framed here as a rival appetite: it doesn not just coexist with love, it crowds it out. Mother Teresa compresses a whole moral worldview into a brisk piece of triage, as if the soul has a limited budget and your attention is the only currency that matters. The line works because it turns a lofty virtue (love) into a practical scheduling problem. If you are busy sorting people into categories - worthy/unworthy, clean/dirty, responsible/irresponsible - you have already chosen a posture of distance. Love, in her formulation, requires proximity.

The subtext is strategically unsentimental. She is not arguing that everyone is good or that harm is not real; she is warning that the act of judging is often a way to protect yourself from being obligated. Judgment can feel like moral rigor, but it is also a tidy exit ramp: once someone has been condemned, you no longer have to be moved by them. Her Catholic framework pushes this further. In a Christian logic of grace, love is not a reward for the deserving; it is an action undertaken before the verdict.

Context matters because her work in Calcutta forced a confrontation with the reflex to judge. Poverty, addiction, illness, and abandonment invite explanations that quickly harden into blame. This sentence is a rebuke to the comfortable onlooker, and a discipline for the caregiver: stay with the person, not the story you tell about why they ended up here. It is moral rhetoric with consequences - an insistence that compassion is not a feeling you wait for, but a practice you make time for.