quotations about mothers
It is a fact perhaps kept a little too much in the background, that mothers have a self larger than their maternity, and that when their sons have become taller than themselves, and are gone from them to college or into the world, there are wide spaces of their time which are not filled with praying for their boys, reading old letters, and envying yet blessing those who are attending to their shirt-buttons.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,
Make me a child again, just for to-night!
Mother, come back from the echoless shore,
Take me again to your heart as of yore;
Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care,
Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair;
Over my slumbers your loving watch keep--
Rock me to sleep, mother--rock me to sleep!
ELIZABETH AKERS ALLEN
"Rock Me to Sleep"
How vastly important is it, then, for mothers to have a higher regard for their duties--to feel deeply the immense responsibilities that rest upon them! It is through their ministrations that the world grows worse or better.
TIMOTHY SHAY ARTHUR
The Mother's Rule; or, The Right Way and the Wrong Way
Lose possession of your child once and the fear it'll happen again becomes your resident hair-trigger insomniac. Once a bad mother, always a bad mother. It's like being an alcoholic: you only ever haven't fallen of the wagon yet.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
The biggest surprise my family could give me on Mother's Day would be to remember it.
KATHY LETTE
attributed, Just Like Mum Says: A Book of Mum's Wit
Being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Have Space Suit--Will Travel
Mother love is the most powerful, the most irrational force on earth, even more powerful than sexual love. However, one does lead to the other, so best not to spurn the former.
RITA MAE BROWN
Full Cry
when you look at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know.
MITCH ALBOM
For One More Day
When you feel neglected, think of the female salmon, who lays 3,000,000 eggs but no one remembers her on Mother's Day.
SAM EWING
attributed, Just Like Mum Says: A Book of Mum's Wit
Mothers with marriageable daughters ought to look out for men of this stamp, men with brains to act as protecting divinity, with worldly wisdom to diagnose like a surgeon, and with experience to take a mother's place in warding off evil.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.
ANONYMOUS
"Mother, Home and Heaven", The Speaker's Garland and Literary Bouquet, 1876
My mom smiled at me. Her smile kind of hugged me.
R. J. PALACIO
Wonder
Among the impulses whose object is a preservation of existence must also be put the love of offspring. So much has been said and written about parental love, about mothers' love especially, that it may seem to the reader doubtful whether this impulse belongs here among the lower animal impulses. But a moment's reflection will convince him that the love of offspring is in its lowest forms a purely animal instinct; seen in the cat's care for her kitten, the hen's for her chickens, the cow's for her calf in every farm-yard; seen also, alas! as a mere blind semi-sensual instinct, in many a home, where the father or mother cannot bear to inflict pain, or thwart a desire, or permit a disappointment, or allow a burden, and so the child grows up, coddled and tended, to be weak and wayward and willful, and often worse. This parental instinct, guided and inspired by the higher nature, is the child's guardian from present evil, and guide into future manhood; but unguided and uninspired, it protects only from pain, which is God's method of discipline, and seeking only happiness, guides often into destruction and misery. It is, too, quite evident that it is necessary for the protection of existence; for the infant, whether of man or animal, is rarely able at first to protect himself; the higher his rank in the scale of being the greater the necessity for protection; and if there were no parental instinct, if there was nothing but a general and distributed sentiment of pity, he would certainly surfer greatly, and would generally die for want of the power in himself of self-protection. The parental instinct endows him with all the faculties and powers of his parent, especially with those of his mother--for in both brutes and men this instinct is almost invariably the strongest in the female--until his own powers have attained sufficient growth to make him able to protect himself.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
He didn't realize that love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
When I feel like I'm not doing what I am supposed to as a mother, I will torture myself. I don't know how to deal with it. I find some consolation in the fact that all mommies feel it. If there was a way to cure mommy guilt, I would bottle it and be a bazillionaire.
ANGIE HARMON
Good Housekeeping, Jul. 2011
The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men -- from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.
"The Professor at the Breakfast Table", Atlantic Monthly, May 1859
A man's mother is so tissued and woven into his life and brain that he can no more describe her than describe the air and sunlight that bless his days.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
"Our Mothers", Mince Pie: Adventures on the Sunny Side of Grub Street
You, mother, are not responsible to set the whole world right; you are responsible only to make one pure, sacred, and divine household.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
In the love of a brave and faithful man there is always a strain of maternal tenderness; he gives out again those beams of protecting fondness which were shed on him as he lay on his mother's knee.
GEORGE ELIOT
Mr. Gilfil's Love Story
Who can lean over a crib at night, marveling upon that infinite innocence and candor swathed in the silk cocoon of childish sleep, without guessing the throb of fierce gentleness that runs in maternal blood? The earth is none too rich in compassion these days: let us be grateful to the mothers for what remains. It was not they who filled the world with spies and quakings. It was not a cabal of mothers that met to decree blood and anguish for the races of men. They know that life is built at too dear a price to be so lathered in corruption and woe. Those who create life, who know its humility, its tender fabric and its infinite price, who have cherished and warmed and fed it, do not lightly cast it into the pit.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
"Our Mothers", Mince Pie: Adventures on the Sunny Side of Grub Street