Widely credited to Mother Teresa and squarely in line with what she taught and how she wrote. But the entire citation trail runs through a single uncited line on Wikiquote — “as quoted in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (2007)” — with no page given, and the only scan of that book we could reach is lending-restricted, so we could not open it and confirm the sentence.
“Don't look for big things, just do small things with great love. The smaller the thing, the greater must be our love” Mother Teresa, as quoted in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, ed. Brian Kolodiejchuk (New York: Doubleday, 2007). Attributed, not verified: no page is given and the passage could not be confirmed in the book. Via Quotle.info
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the world of Mother Teresa — Catholic nun & founder of the Missionaries of Charity. Theme: "Don't look for big things, just do small things with great love. The smaller the thing, the greater must be our love". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Don't look for big things, just do small things with great love. The smaller the thing, the greater must be our love". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The citation trail
Cited source
Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta”
Edited & published
Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C. · Doubleday, New York, 2007 — ten years after her death
Page
None given. Wikiquote names the book and stops there; no site we checked adds a page or chapter.
Confirmed in the text?
No. The Internet Archive’s scan of the 2007 edition is lending-restricted, so its full text could not be searched.
Don’t look for big things, just do small things with great love…. The smaller the thing, the greater must be our love.
text omitted in the source
The ellipsis is not ours. Wikiquote prints the line with four dots between the halves — a full stop plus an ellipsis — which conventionally marks omitted material, meaning the two sentences may not have been adjacent in the original. Whatever stood between them is not reproduced anywhere we could reach.
Wikiquote’s Mother Teresa page ↗ carries the line in its sourced section, credited “As quoted in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (2007) by Brian Kolodiejchuk” — and its Misattributed section, which flags the Paradoxical Commandments, does not mention this line at all.
The book is real and checkable: the 2007 Doubleday first edition, edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk, is catalogued at the Internet Archive ↗. The scan is access-restricted, so we could not search it for the sentence, and no page number appears in any secondary citation.
Every quote site we opened copies the same line without adding anything. QuotePark says so outright ↗ — “Adopted from Wikiquote” — and Lib Quotes ↗ reproduces the identical citation with no page.
Quote Investigator has never examined this sentence: its Mother Teresa category ↗ holds one article, on the Paradoxical Commandments. With no specialist finding to lean on and no page to check, attributed is as far as the evidence goes.
The work this line is cited to, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, was first published by Doubleday in 2007 — a decade after her death — so it is firmly under United States copyright. Her underlying letters and instructions, published or not, remain with her estate; there is no public-domain edition of this text, and no earlier published source for the wording has been identified.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
The wording problem
Nothing here says Mother Teresa didn’t say it. The trouble is that this thought travels in half a dozen shapes under her name, and the shape most people share is not the one with a citation attached to it.
~
The version everyone shares“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” paraphrase
✓The idea is unmistakably hers. The sentence rests on one uncited entry in Wikiquote’s sourced list ↗, which names the posthumous Come Be My Light (2007) and gives no page — so we call it attributed, not verified.
Context
Why this one is hard to pin down
Mother Teresa said some version of this constantly. That is the problem. The thought — that the size of an act is the wrong thing to measure, and that a smaller act demands more love rather than less — runs through her talks, letters and instructions for decades, and it comes back out in a dozen different sentences. Some are hers word for word; some are a listener’s summary that hardened into a quotation.
There is also a small typographic tell. Wikiquote prints the line as “great love....The smaller the thing” — four dots, a full stop plus an ellipsis, which conventionally marks material left out between two sentences. Read literally, the two halves everyone shares as one quotation may not have stood next to each other in whatever Mother Teresa originally wrote. Nothing we could find reproduces the omitted middle, and the one book cited is not searchable online.
The idea is unmistakably hers. The sentence is a citation with no page behind it.
What we ruled out
We checked her most-quoted set-piece text, the address to the National Prayer Breakfast of 3 February 1994 ↗. It does not contain this line; its nearest relative is “It is not how much we do, but how much love we put into what we do.”
Quote Investigator, the usual court of last resort, has not investigated this sentence. Its Mother Teresa file ↗ holds a single article, and it is about a text that turned out not to be hers at all.
We could not search the cited book. The 2007 Doubleday first edition is catalogued at the Internet Archive ↗, but the scan is access-restricted, so its full text is closed to search.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1910–1997 · Catholic nun & founder of the Missionaries of Charity
Born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje on 26 August 1910, she founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta in 1950 and spent nearly half a century running homes for the dying, the abandoned and the sick. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, died on 5 September 1997, and was canonised by the Catholic Church on 4 September 2016. Her characteristic teaching was exactly this one — that scale is the wrong measure of a good act — which is why so many differently-worded versions of it circulate under her name.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cited source (unconfirmed)
Mother Teresa, “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the ‘Saint of Calcutta,’” ed. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C. (New York: Doubleday, 2007). Cited without page by Wikiquote; the passage could not be independently confirmed in the book’s text.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Don't look for big things, just do small things with great love. The smaller the thing, the greater must be our love’?” Last verified 18 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/dont-look-for-big-things-just-do-small-things-with-great/