Mums

No language can express the power and beauty and heroism of a mother’s love. – Edwin Chapin

Being a full-time mother is one of the highest salaried jobs… since the payment is pure love. – Mildred B. Vermont

Mother: the most beautiful word on the lips of mankind. – Kahlil Gibran

When you were small and just a touch away, I covered you with blankets against the cold night air. But now that you are tall and out of reach, I fold my hands and cover you with prayer. – Dona Maddux Cooper

Every mother is like Moses. She does not enter the Promised Land. She prepares a world she will not see. – Pope Paul VI

Her dignity consists of being unknown to the world; her glory is in the esteem of her husband; her pleasures in the happiness of her family. – Jean Rousseau

I remember my mother’s prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life. – Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

My mother was the making of me. She was so true and so sure of me, I felt that I had someone to live for – someone I must not disappoint. The memory of my mother will always be a blessing to me. – Thomas A Edison

Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers, and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother in the whole world. – Kate Douglas Wiggin

Before you were conceived I wanted you. Before you were born I loved you. Before you were here an hour I would die for you. This is the miracle of love. – Maureen Hawkins

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 who rejoice with us in our sunshine, desert us when troubles thicken 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. – Washington Irving

Of all the rights of women, the greatest is to be a mother. – Lin Yutang

A man loves his sweetheart the most; his wife the best, but his mother the longest. – Irish Proverb

A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them. – Victor Hugo

A hundred men may make an encampment, but it takes a woman to make a home. – Chinese proverb

God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers. – Jewish Proverb

A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to making leaning unnecessary. – Dorothy Canfield Fisher

A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie. – Tenneva Jordan

My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her. – George Washington (1732-1799)

My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it. – Mark Twain

And it came to me, and I knew what I had to have before my soul would rest. I wanted to belong – to belong to my mother. And in return – I wanted my mother to belong to me. – Gloria Vanderbilt

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness. – Honore’ de Balzac (1799-1850)

There never was a woman like her. She was gentle as a dove and brave as a lioness… The memory of my mother and her teachings were, after all, the only capital I had to start life with, and on that capital I have made my way. – Andrew Jackson

When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child. – Sophia Loren, from Women and Beauty

Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; a mother’s secret hope outlives them all. – Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)

The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother–which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician. – Sidney J. Harris

Only mothers can think of the future-because they give birth to it in their children. – Maxim Gorky

The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world. – W.R. Wallace

Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president, but they don’t want them to become politicians in the process. – John Fitzgerald Kennedy

My mother had a slender, small body, but a large heart – a heart so large that everybody’s grief and everybody’s joy found welcome in it, and hospitable accommodation. – Mark Twain

Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life. – Sophocles

To a child’s ear, “mother” is magic in any language. – Arlene Benedict

She is my first, great love. She was a wonderful, rare woman – you do not know; as strong, and steadfast, and generous as the sun. She could be as swift as a white whiplash, and as kind and gentle as warm rain, and as steadfast as the irreducible earth beneath us. – D H Lawrence

Is my mother my friend? I would have to say, first of all she is my Mother, with a capital ‘M’; she’s something sacred to me. I love her dearly… yes, she is also a good friend, someone I can talk openly with if I want to. – Sophia Loren

A good mother is worth hundreds of schoolmasters. – George Herbert

Woman knows what man has long forgotten, that the ultimate economic and spiritual unit of any civilization is still the family. – Clare Boothe Luce

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

Youth fades, love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; a mother’s secret hope outlives them all. – Oliver Wendell Holmes

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children. – William Makepeace Thackeray

The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat. – Robert Frost

You may have tangible wealth untold: Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be, I had a Mother who read to me. – Strickland Gillilan

The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom. – Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)

God sees us through our Mothers’ eyes and rewards us for our virtues. – Ganeshan Venkatarman

She tried in every way to understand me, and she succeeded. It was this deep, loving understanding as long as she lived that more than anything else helped and sustained me on my way to success. – Mae West

When I stopped seeing my mother with the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself. – Nancy Friday

No influence is so powerful as that of the mother. – Sarah Josepha Hale

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see — or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read. – Alice Walker

I cannot forget my mother. She is my bridge. When I needed to get across, she steadied herself long enough for me to run across safely. – Renita Weems

Who ran to help me when I fell, and would some pretty story tell, or kiss the place to make it well? My Mother. – Jane and Ann Taylor Original Poems for Infant Minds “My Mother”

Who is it that loves me and will love me for ever with an affection which no chance, no misery, no crime of mine can do away? It is you, my mother. – Thomas Carlyle

In the beginning there was my mother. a shape. a shape and a force, standing in the light. You could see her energy; it was visible in the air. Against any background she stood out. – Marilyn Krysl

Make a memory with your children, spend some time to show you care; toys and trinkets can’t replace those precious moments that you share. – Elaine Hardt

The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother’s side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent. – Erich Fromm

The noblest calling in the world is that of mother. True motherhood is the most beautiful of all arts, the greatest of all professions. She who can paint a masterpiece or who can write a book that will influence millions deserves the plaudits and admiration of mankind; but she who rears successfully a family of healthy, beautiful sons and daughters whose immortal souls will be exerting an influence throughout the ages long after paintings shall have faded, and books and statues shall have been destroyed, deserves the highest honor that man can give.  – David 0. McKay

Mothers are instinctive philosophers. – Harriet Beecher Stowe

A good mother is worth hundreds of schoolmasters. – George Herbert

The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom. – Henry Ward Beecher

Mother is the one we count on for the things that matter most of all. – Katherine Butler Hathaway

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night. – Margaret Mead

A mother understands what a child does not say. – Jewish proverb

To be a mother is a woman’s greatest vocation in life. She is a partner with God. No being has a position of such power and influence. She holds in her hands the destiny of nations, for to her comes the responsibility and opportunity of molding the nation’s citizens.  – Spencer W. Kimball

The strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws. – Barbara Kingsolver

Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, once entertained a woman from Campania at her house. Since the woman made a great show of her jewels, which were among the most beautiful of the time, Cornelia detained her conversation until her children came home from school. Then, pointing to her children, she said, ‘These are my jewels.’ – Valerius Maximus

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes. – Robert Frost

It was my mother who taught us to stand up to our problems, not only in the world around us but in ourselves. – Dorothy Pitman Hughes

The love of husbands and wives may waver; brothers and sisters may become deep-rooted enemies; but a mother’s love is so strong and unyielding that it usually endures all circumstances: good fortune and misfortune, prosperity and privation, honor and disgrace. A mother’s love perceives no impossibilities. – Paddock

Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life. – Sophocles

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his. – Oscar Wilde

Mother love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible. – Marion C. Garretty

Mother — that was the bank where we deposited all our hurts and worries. – T. DeWitt Talmage

Motherhood is priced of God, at price no man may dare to lessen or misunderstand. – Helen Hunt Jackson

Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother. – Oprah Winfrey

When you educate a man you educate an individual; when you educate a woman you educate a whole family. – Robert M. Maciver

It seems to me that my mother was the most splendid woman I ever knew….I have met a lot of people knocking around the world since, but I have never met a more thoroughly refined woman than my mother. If I have amounted to anything, it will be due to her. – Charles Chaplin

Bringing a child into the world is one of the greatest acts of hope there is. – Louise Hart

Motherhood is like Albania — you can’t trust the descriptions in the books, you have to go there. – Marni Jackson

I shall never forget my mother, for it was she who planted and nurtured the first seeds of good within me. She opened my heart to the lasting impressions of nature; she awakened my understanding and extended my horizon and her precepts exerted an everlasting influence upon the course of my life. – Immanuel Kant

So when the great word ‘Mother!’ rang once more, I saw at last its meaning and its place; Not the blind passion of the brooding past, But Mother — the World’s Mother — come at last, To love as she had never loved before — To feed and guard and teach the human race. – Charlotte Perkins Gilman

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of priests. – Spanish Proverb

Over my slumbers your loving watch keep; Rock me to sleep, mother; rock me to sleep. – Elizabeth Chase

Women’s rights in essence is really a movement for freedom, a movement for equality, for the dignity of all women, for those who work outside the home and those who dedicate themselves with more altruism than any profession I know to being wives and mothers, cooks and chauffeurs, and child psychologists and loving human beings. – Jill Ruckelshaus

My mother used to say, “He who angers you, conquers you!” But my mother was a saint. – Elizabeth Kenny

To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. – Maya Angelou

It is not that I half knew my mother. I knew half of her: the lower half – her lap, legs, feet, her hands and wrists as she bent forward. – Flann O’Brien The Hard Life

I think my life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face. – George Eliot

Arise then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts! … We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs…. – Julia Ward Howe, promoter of a Mother’s Day for Peace

A mother has, perhaps, the hardest earthly lot; and yet no mother worthy of the name ever gave herself thoroughly for her child who did not feel that, after all, she reaped what she had sown. – Henry Ward Beecher

Our children are not going to be just “our children” – they are going to be other people’s husbands and wives and the parents of our grandchildren.  – Mary S Calderone

She was the archetypal selfless mother: living only for her children, sheltering them from the consequences of their actions — and in the end doing them irreparable harm. – Marcia Muller

She was the best of all mothers, to whom I owe endless gratitude.  – Thomas Carlyle

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family. But here again, because there is nothing to sell, there is a very general disposition to regard a married woman’s work as no work at all, and to take it as a matter of course that she should not be paid for it.  – George Bernard Shaw

There was never a great man who had not a great mother. – Olive Schreiner

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mother’s names. – Alice Walker

Motherhood is the greatest potential influence in human society. Her caress first awakens in the child a sense of security; her kiss the first realization of affection; her sympathy and tenderness, the first assurance that there is love in the world. Thus in infancy and childhood she implants ever-directing and restraining influences that remain through life. – David 0. McKay

I affirm my profound belief that God’s greatest creation is womanhood. I also believe that there is no greater good in all the world than motherhood. The influence of a mother in the lives of her children is beyond calculation.  – James E. Faust

 

The older I become, the more I think about my mother. – Ingmar Bergman

I cannot tell you how much I owe to the solemn word of my good mother. – Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Motherhood: All love begins and ends there. – Robert Browning

Mother’s Day is in honor of the best Mother who ever lived – the Mother of your heart. – Anna Jarvis

A mother is she who can take the place of all others but whose place no one else can take. – Cardinal Mermillod

It’s the three pairs of eyes that mothers have to have…One pair that sees through closed doors. Another in the back of her head…and, of course, the ones in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and reflect ‘I understand and I love you’ without so much as uttering a word.  – Erma Bombeck

My mother wanted me to be her wings, to fly as she never quite had the courage to do. I love her for that. I love the fact that she wanted to give birth to her own wings. – Erica Jong

Children and mothers never truly part – Bound in the beating of each other’s heart. – Charlotte Gray

A woman’s love is mighty, but a mother’s heart is weak, and by its weakness overcomes. – Lowell

It was my mother who gave me my voice. She did this, I know now, by clearing a space where my words could fall, grow, then find their way to others. – Paula Giddings

In the man whose childhood has known caresses, there is always a fiber of memory that can be touched to gentle issues. – George Eliot

So for the mother’s sake the child was dear, and dearer was the mother for the child. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Womanliness means only motherhood; all love begins and ends there. – Robert Browning

Stories first heard at a mother’s knee are never wholly forgotten – a little spring that never quite dries up in our journey through scorching years.  – Giovanni Ruffini

My mother never gave up on me. I messed up in school so much they were sending me home, but my mother sent me right back. – Denzel Washington

Before becoming a mother I had a hundred theories on how to bring up children. Now I have seven children and only one theory: love them, especially when they least deserve to be loved. – Kate Samperi

Then someone placed her in my arms. She looked up at me. The crying stopped. Her eyes melted through me, forging a connection in me with their soft heat.  – Shirley Maclaine

We are together, my child and I. Mother and child, yes, but sisters really, against whatever denies us all that we are.  – Alice Walker

People always talked about a mother’s uncanny ability to read her children, but that was nothing compared to how children could read their mothers.  – Anne Tyler

I love being a mother…I am more aware. I feel things on a deeper level. I have a kind of understanding about my body, about being a woman.  – Shelley Long

In the sheltered simplicity of the first days after a baby is born, one sees again the magical closed circle, the miraculous sense of two people existing only for each other. – Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Mothers have as powerful an influence over the welfare of future generations as all other earthly causes combined.  – John S C Abbott

The mother is the most precious possessions of the nation, so precious that society advances its highest well-being when it protects the functions of the mother. – Ellen Key

Men make a camp; a swarm of bees a comb; Birds make a nest; a woman makes a home. – Arthur Guiterman

Mother is the heartbeat in the home; and without her, there seems to be no heart throb. – Leroy Brownlow

The first home was made when a woman, cradling in her loving arms a baby, crooned a lullaby. The home is a tryst – the place where we retire and shut the world out. – Elbert Hubbard

Motherhood is the one thing in all the world which most truly exemplifies the God-given virtues of creating and sacrificing. Though it carries the woman close to the brink of death, motherhood also leads her into the very realm of the fountains of life and makes her co-partner with the Creator in bestowing upon eternal spirits mortal life. – David O. McKay

The best academy, a mother’s knee. – James Russell Lowell

Mother’s love grown by giving. – Charles Lamb

In all my efforts to learn to read, my mother shared fully my ambition and sympathized with me and aided me in every way she could. If I have done anything in life worth attention, I feel sure that I inherited the disposition from my mother. – Booker T. Washington

Becoming a mother makes you the mother of all children. From now on each wounded, abandoned, frightened child is yours. You live in the suffering mothers of every race and creed and weep with them. You long to comfort all who are desolate.  – Charlotte Gray

Mother – the essence of loveliness, the Beauty of a rose, the sparkle of a dewdrop and sunset’s sweet repose. – Lydia M. Johnson

The bearing and the training of a child is woman’s wisdom. – Lord Tennyson

The real secret: motherhood love, the thing that money can’t buy. – Anna Crosby

Whenever I’m with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.  – Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife

Motherly love is not much use if it expresses itself only as a warm gush of emotion, delicately tinged with pink. It must also be strong, guiding and unselfish. The sweetly sung lullaby; the cool hand on the fevered brow, the Mother’s Day smiles and flowers are only a small part of the picture. True mothers have to be made of steel to withstand the difficulties that are sure to beset their children. – Rachel Billington, The Great Umbilical

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws. – Barbara Kingsolver

There is no influence so powerful as that of the mother.  – Sarah Josepha Hale

Women do not have to sacrifice personhood if they are mothers. They do not have to sacrifice motherhood in order to be persons. Liberation was meant to expand women’s opportunities, not to limit them. The self-esteem that has been found in new pursuits can also be found in mothering.  – Elaine Heffner

The future destiny of the child is always the work of the mother. – Napoleon Bonaparte

A woman is like a teabag. Only when in hot water do you realize how strong she is. – Nancy Reagan

The role of mother is probably the most important career a woman can have.  – Janet Mary Riley

No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. – Florida Scott-Maxwell

Motherhood is a wonderful thing – what a pity to waste it on children.  – Judith Pugh

I never thought that you should be rewarded for the greatest privilege of life. – Mary Roper Coker, Mother of the Year 1958

The mother, more than any other, affects the moral and spiritual part of the children’s character. She is their constant companion and teacher in formative years. The child is ever imitating and assimilating the mother’s nature. It is only in after life that men gaze backward and behold how a mother’s hand and heart of love molded their young lives and shaped their destiny. – E.W. Caswell

The biggest lesson we have to give our children is truth.  – Goldie Hawn

What you teach your own children is what you really believe in.  – Cathy Warner Weatherford

Motherhood brings as much joy as ever, but it still brings boredom, exhaustion, and sorrow too. Nothing else ever will make you as happy or as sad, as proud or as tired, for nothing is quite as hard as helping a person develop his own individuality especially while you struggle to keep your own. – Marguerite Kelly and Elia Parsons

Making the decision to have a child – it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.  – Elizabeth Stone

Education commences at the mother’s knee, and every word spoken within the hearing of little children tends towards the formation of character. – Hosea Ballou

I saw pure love when my son looked at me, and I knew that I had to make a good life for the two of us…  – Suzanne Somers

Being a mother means – Never being number one in your list of priorities and not minding at all.  – Jasmine Guinness

If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much. – Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

No animal is so inexhaustible as an excited infant.  – Amy Leslie

Discovering that with every child, your heart grows bigger and stronger – that there is no limit to how much or how many people you can love, even though at times you feel as though you could burst – you don’t – you just love even more. – Yasmin Le Bon

I looked on child-rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring it.  – Rose Kennedy

Loving a child doesn’t mean giving in to all his whims; to love him is to bring out the best in him, to teach him to love what is difficult.  – Nadia Boulanger

There is nothing more thrilling in this world, I think, than having a child that is yours, and yet is mysteriously a stranger.  – Agatha Christie

The best advice from my mother was a reminder to tell my children every day: ‘Remember you are loved.’  – Evelyn McCormick

There is a point at which you aren’t as much mom and daughter as you are adults and friends.  – Jamie Lee Curtis

A mother’s love is patient and forgiving when all others are forsaking, and it never fails or falters, even though the heart is breaking.  – Helen Steiner Rice

Women as the guardians of children possess a great power. They are the molders of their children’s personalities and the arbiters of their development.  – Ann Oakley

Being a mother has made my life complete.  – Darcy Bussell

If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby ‘it.’  – Jerome K Jerome

The story of a mother’s life: Trapped between a scream and a hug. – Cathy Guisewite, “Like Mother, Like Daughter”

The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.  – Jean Kerr

In the evening, after she has gone to sleep, I kneel beside the crib and touch her face, where it is pressed against the slats, with mine.  – Joan Didion

My mother taught me to walk proud and tall ‘as if the world was mine’. – Sophia Loren

As a parent you try to maintain a certain amount of control and so you have this tug-of-war … You have to learn when to let go. And that’s not easy. – Aretha Franklin

A woman has two smiles that an angel might envy – the smile that accepts a lover before words are uttered, and the smile that lights on the first born babe, and assures it of a mother’s love. – Thomas C Haliburton

Bitter are the tears of a child: Sweeten them.   Deep are the thoughts of a child: Quiet them. Sharp is the grief of a child: Take it from him. Soft is the heart of a child: Do not harden it.  – Pamela Glenconner

Love your children with all your hearts, love them enough to discipline them before it is too late…Praise them for important things, even if you have to stretch them a bit. Praise them a lot. They live on it like bread and butter and they need it more than bread and butter.  – Lavina Christensen Fugal

What feeling is so nice as a child’s hand in yours? So small, so soft and warm, like a kitten huddling in the shelter of your clasp. – Marjorie Holmes

There came a moment quite suddenly a mother realized that a child was no longer hers. … without bothering to ask or even give notice, her daughter had just grown up. – Alice Hoffman

Never marry a man who hates his mother, because he’ll end up hating you.  – Jill Bennett

Mother always said that honesty was the best policy, and money isn’t everything. She was wrong about other things too.  – Gerald Barzan

There is only one pretty child in the world, and every mother has it. – Chinese Proverb

It is not what you do for your children but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings.”  – Ann Landers

Children should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.  – Natalia Ginzburg

Many people have said to me ‘What a pity you had such a big family to raise. Think of the novels and the short stories and the poems you never had time to write because of that.’ And I looked at my children and I said, ‘These are my poems. These are my short stories.’ – Olga Masters

I stood in the hospital corridor the night after she was born. Through a window I could see all the small, crying newborn infants, and somewhere among them slept the one who was mine. I stood there for hours filled with happiness until the night nurse sent me to bed. – Liv Ullman

When a child enters the world through you it alters everything on a psychic, psychological and purely practical level.  – Jane Fonda

All the earth, though it were full of kind hearts, is but a desolation and a desert place to a mother when her only child is absent.  – Elizabeth Gaskell

Be a first-rate version of yourself, not a second-rate version of someone else.  – Judy Garland, to her daughter, Liza Minelli

Though motherhood is the most important of all the professions — requiring more knowledge than any other department in human affairs — there was no attention given to preparation for this office.  – Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life. – Sophocles

There are two lasting bequests we can give our children: One is roots. The other is wings.  – Hodding Carter, Jr.

Only a mother knows a mother’s fondness. – Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new. – Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

A daughter reminds you of all the things you had forgotten about being young. Good and bad. – Maeve O’Reilly

My mother drew a distinction between achievement and success. She said that ‘achievement is the knowledge that you have studied and worked hard and done the best that is in you. Success is being praised by others, and that’s nice, too, but not as important or satisfying. Always aim for achievement and forget about success.’  – Helen Hayes

My mother’s best advice to me was: ‘Whatever you decide to do in life, be sure that the joy of doing it does not depend upon the applause of others, because in the long run we are, all of us, alone.’ – Ali MacGraw

Motherhood cannot finally be delegated. Breastfeeding may succumb to the bottle; cuddling, fondling, and pediatric visits may also be done by fathers… but when a child needs a mother to talk to, nobody else but a mother will do.  – Erica Jong

The doctors told me that I would never walk, but my mother told me I would, so I believed my mother. – Wilma Rudolph, American athlete

The outside world doesn’t have a lot to offer. You have to make your own heaven in your own home. -Bette Midler

Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at de sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground. – Zora Neale Hurston

Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree. –  Martin Wright Edelman

The country clubs, the cars, the boats – your assets may be ample, but the best inheritance you can leave your kids is to be a good example. – Barry Spilchuk

When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness’ sake. But don’t make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles ’em. – Harper Lee

We worry about what a child will be tomorrow, yet we forgot that he is someone today. – Stacia Tauscher

A vacation frequently means that the family goes away for a rest, accompanied by mother, who sees that the others get it. – Marcelene Cox

Babies don’t need fathers, but mothers do. Someone who is taking care of a baby needs to be taken care of. – Amy Heckerling

Holding your firstborn, your wife looks at you through different eyes, a traveler from another country. The mothering cues are clearly rooted very deep in the female psyche. – Charlton Heston

When I pick up one of my children and cuddle them, all the strain and stress of life temporarily disappears. There is nothing more wonderful than motherhood and no one will ever love you as much as a small child.  – Nicola Horlick

What do girls do who haven’t any mothers to help them through their troubles? – Louisa May Alcott

Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother. – Jane Welsh Carlyle

A hundred years from now… it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove… but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child.  – Kathy Davis

If I was damned of body and soul, I know whose prayers would make me whole, Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine. – Rudyard Kipling

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 who rejoice with us in our sunshine, desert us when troubles thicken around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavour by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts. – Washington Irving

Men are what their mothers made them. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am an onlooker on my daughter’s dance, which I made possible because she came through me…I’m not a part of her dance. Yet whenever she takes a pause and needs someone to talk to, I am there. But that special dance with the child and the future is hers. – Liv Ullman

Mother love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible. – Marion C. Garretty

Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother. – Oprah Winfrey

All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother. – Abraham Lincoln

Being a mother is an excitement and enticement and a growth. It is the possibility that haunts and delights the young girl as she grows to womanhood. It is a part of the fantasy, both her longing for it and her fear of it. The months of pregnancy highlight all the richness of the remembered and internalized experience about mothering. The birth itself brings forth the baby, until now a fantasy, into reality. This real baby is a constant changing, crying, knowing being, and for me the delight of this experience has been one of the most important parts of my life as a woman.  – Dr. Beverley Raphael

My mother always told me I wouldn’t amount to anything because I procrastinate. I said ‘Just wait’. – Judy Tenuta

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother. – Theodore M. Hesburgh

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class. – Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Only God Himself fully appreciates the influence of a Christian mother in the molding of character in her children. – Billy Graham

No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. – Florida Scott Maxwell

No one in the world can take the place of your mother. Right or wrong, from her viewpoint you are always right. She may scold you for little things, but never for the big ones. – Harry Truman

The mother is everything – she is our consolation in sorrow, our hope in misery, and our strength in weakness. She is the source of love, mercy, sympathy, and forgiveness. He who loses his mother loses a pure soul who blesses and guards him constantly. – Kahlil Gibran

What the child says, he has heard at home. – African Proverb

The future destiny of a child is always the work of the mother. – Napoleon Bonaparte

A mother’s heart is always with her children. – Proverb

The God to whom little boys say their prayers has a face very like their mother’s. – James Matthew Barrie

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

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee calls back the lovely April of her prime. – William Shakespeare, Sonnets

God knows that a mother needs fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul. But because I happen to be a parent of almost fiercely maternal nature, I praise casualness. It seems to me the rarest of virtues. It is useful enough when children are small. It is useful to the point of necessity when they are adolescents – Phyllis McGinley

A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years, but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind. – Albert Einstein

The greatest love is a mother’s; then a dog’s; then a sweetheart’s. – Polish proverb

When I was a child, my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk you’ll end up as the pope.’ Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso. – Picasso

In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own. – Alice Walker

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me. – Alice Walker

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Who ran to help me when I fell, and would some pretty story tell, or kiss the place to make it well?  My mother! – Ann Taylor

Hope is the companion of power, and mother of success; for who so hopes strongly has within him the gift of miracles. – Samuel Smiles

At work, you think of the children you have left at home. At home, you think of the work you’ve left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself. Your heart is rent. – Golda Meir

Anyone who doesn’t miss the past never had a mother. –  Gregory Nunn

Few misfortunes can befall a boy which brings worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother. – W Somerset Maugham

Women do not have to sacrifice personhood if they are mothers. They do not have to sacrifice motherhood in order to be persons. Liberation was meant to expand women’s opportunities, not to limit them. The self-esteem that has been found in new pursuits can also be found in mothering. – Elaine Heffner

The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny. – Albert Ellis

When a woman is twenty, a child deforms her; when she is thirty, he preserves her; and when forty, he makes her young again. – Leon Blum

Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same; and most mothers kiss and scold together. – Pearl S Buck

The watchful mother tarries nigh, though sleep has closed her infant’s eyes. – John Keble

Motherhood is the strangest thing; it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse. – Rebecca West

Maternity is on the face of it an unsociable experience. The selfishness that a woman has learned to stifle or to dissemble where she alone is concerned, blooms freely and unashamed on behalf of her offspring. – Emily James Putnam

Hundreds of dewdrops to greet the dawn, Hundreds of bees in the purple clover, Hundreds of butterflies on the lawn, But only one mother the wide world over. – George Cooper

Being a full-time mother is one of the highest salaried jobs… since the payment is pure love. – Mildred B. Vermont

The sweetest sounds to mortals given are heard in Mother, Home, and Heaven. – William Goldsmith Brown

Woman in the home has not yet lost her dignity, in spite of Mother’s Day, with its offensive implication that our love needs an annual nudging, like our enthusiasm for the battle of Bunker Hill.  – John Erskine

Mother love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible. – Marion C. Garretty, quoted in A Little Spoonful of Chicken Soup for the Mother’s Soul

Mother — that was the bank where we deposited all our hurts and worries. – T. DeWitt Talmage

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

My mom is a never-ending song in my heart of comfort, happiness, and being.  I may sometimes forget the words but I always remember the tune. – Graycie Harmon

Making the decision to have a child is momentous.  It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. – Elizabeth Stone

All mothers are working mothers. – Author Unknown

Now that… my kids are grown, I understand how much work and love it takes to raise and to keep a family together.  The example of your strength, devotion, and patience is now rippling through the generations.  Thank you! – Forest Houtenschil

Everybody knows that a good mother gives her children a feeling of trust and stability. She is their earth. She is the one they can count on for the things that matter most of all. She is their food and their bed and the extra blanket when it grows cold in the night; she is their warmth and their health and their shelter; she is the one they want to be near when they cry. She is the only person in the whole world in a whole lifetime who can be these things to her children. There is no substitute for her. Somehow even her clothes feel different to her children’s hands from anybody else’s clothes. Only to touch her skirt or her sleeve makes a troubled child feel better. – Katharine Butler Hathaway

Now the thing about having a baby – and I can’t be the first person to have noticed this – is that thereafter you have it.  – Jean Kerr

It will be gone before you know it. The fingerprints on the wall appear higher and higher. Then suddenly they disappear.  – Dorothy Evslin

My Mother’s love is the Almond Blossom of my mind and the fragrance is worth dying for. Her gentle compassionate touch shaped my very essence and — forever — I shall remember and although we are separated by the corridor of life and the doorway of heaven, I will always attempt to become the man that she perceived me to be. I love you mom, where ever you are and I hope you can feel my written word and I envision you enveloped in a shortcut of kindness and love and — forever — happy and content. God bless all of the Mothers of this world and other Space Time Continuum. – Frank L. de Roos III

This heart, my own dear mother, bends, with love’s true instinct, back to thee! – Thomas Moore

A mother is a person who if she is not there when you get home from school you wouldn’t know how to get your dinner, and you wouldn’t feel like eating it anyway. – Anonymous

“A man’s work is from sun to sun, but a mother’s work is never done.” – Unknown

The joys of motherhood are never fully experienced until the children are in bed. – Author Unknown

Who fed me from her gentle breast and hushed me in her arms to rest, and on my cheek sweet kisses prest?  My Mother. – Anne Taylor

On Mother’s Day I have written a poem for you.  In the interest of poetic economy and truth, I have succeeded in concentrating my deepest feelings and beliefs into two perfectly crafted lines:  You’re my mother, I would have no other! – Forest Houtenschil

Fifty-four years of love and tenderness and crossness and devotion and unswerving loyalty. Without her I could have achieved a quarter of what I have achieved, not only in terms of success and career, but in terms of personal happiness…She has never stood between me and my life, never tried to hold me too tightly, always let me go free… – Noel Coward

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 who rejoice with us in our sunshine 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. – Washington Irving