Daily Inspiration Quote by Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa’s sentence moves like a liturgy, but it’s engineered as a directive. “Let us” recruits the listener into a collective moral body; it’s not advice so much as conscription. The verbs do the real work: “touch” collapses distance, dragging compassion out of the realm of sentiment and into the risky, intimate space of skin, smell, contagion, and discomfort. She doesn’t say “help” or “serve” first; she starts with contact, the one thing polite society instinctively avoids when faced with “the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted.” That list is a map of modern abandonment: not only material deprivation but social exile.

The subtext is theological but also practical. “According to the graces we have received” frames charity as debt repayment, not personal virtue. You give because you’ve already been given to, which quietly strips away the ego-friendly narrative of the benefactor as hero. It also establishes a hierarchy of obligation: your comfort is not neutral; it’s an inherited resource with strings attached.

Then comes the emotional hurdle she anticipates: shame and slowness. She names the twin excuses of the well-meaning - fear of looking foolish in low-status labor, and the procrastination that masquerades as prudence. “Humble work” is a rhetorical trapdoor: it refuses glamour, refuses policy talk, refuses the safe distance of moral opinions. In the late-20th-century context of televised poverty and institutional care, the line reads like a rebuke to spectatorship. Don’t just feel. Don’t just donate. Get close, and do it now.