MOTHER QUOTES II
quotations about mothers
Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.
JAMES JOYCE
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pity the mother who assumes the name without being all this implies!
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
No language can express the power, and beauty, and heroism, and majesty of a mother's love.... It shrinks not where man cowers, and grows stronger where man faints, and over the wastes of worldly fortune sends the radiance of its quenchless fidelity like a star in heaven.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
A mother is a mother still,
The holiest thing alive.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
The Three Graves
The so-called mother of the child isn't the child's begetter, but only a sort of nursing soil for the new-sown seed. The man, the one on top, is the true parent, while she, a stranger, foster's a stranger's sprout.
AESCHYLUS
Eumenides
Behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begin.
MITCH ALBOM
For One More Day
The best place to cry is on a mother's arms.
JODI PICOULT
House Rules
Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.
BIBLE
Exodus 20:12
Mothers are great in the eyes of their sons because they are knit in our minds with all the littlenesses of life, the unspeakably dear trifles and odds of existence.... They love us not wisely but too well, it is sometimes said. Ah, in a world where so many love us not well but too wisely, how tremulously our hearts turn back to bathe in that running river of their love and ceaseless charm!
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
"Our Mothers", Mince Pie: Adventures on the Sunny Side of Grub Street
And all my mother came into mine eyes
And gave me up to tears.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Henry V
New joys usurp the old ones in her life. She did enjoy music; now to her the sweetest songs are the lullabies she sings to her own babe. She did enjoy literature; now the best literature is the stories she reads to her children. No society is to her so delightful as the society which they afford her. Better than any dance she ever shared is it to watch their frolic; the ball-room has no charms that can compete with the nursery. No eloquence thrills her heart as does the language of her children, who speak what is even to their father an unknown tongue.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
attributed, The Life of Abraham Lincoln
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
I like it when my mother smiles. And I especially like it when I make her smile.
ADRIANA TRIGIANI
Viola in Reel Life
Kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Pigs in Heaven
I wanted to go to a place where you were important and people listened to what you had to say. Mothering hadn't done that ... and yet ... wouldn't it be ironic if my turf yielded the most important commodity being grown today? A family? A crop of children, seeded by two people, nourished by love, watered by tears, and in eighteen or twenty years harvested into worthwhile human beings to go through the process again.
ERMA BOMBECK
Family: The Ties that Bind--and Gag!
If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.
SIGMUND FREUD
A Childhood Recollection
I appreciate the chance to visit my mom on Mother's Day -- it's like taking a refresher course in guilt.
WOODY ALLEN
Just Like Mum Says: A Book of Mum's Wit
Motherhood is an early retirement position. Your children do grow up.
COLLEEN PARRO
PBS interview