Mother and Motherhood

Oh, what a power is motherhood, possessing / A potent spell. All women alike / Fight fiercely for a child.

This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more certain that they are their own.

Only mothers can think of the future—because they give birth to it in their children.

A fluent tongue is the only thing a mother don’t like her daughter to resemble her in.

I sometimes have the feeling that her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother’s, much as the course of a ball on the billiard table is merely the continuation of the player’s arm movement.

I can still hear my mother wailing over some new kitchen crisis, “Oh God,” and my father answering cozily from the silo, “Were you calling me, dear?"

That child whose mother has never smiled upon him is worthy neither of the table of the gods nor the couch of the goddesses.

High people, Sir, are the best; take a hundred ladies of quality, you’ll find them better wives, better mothers, more willing to sacrifice their own pleasures to their children, than a hundred other women.

Beginnings are apt to be shadowy and so it is the beginnings of the great mother life, the sea.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers' names.

You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's.

Motherhood all love begins and ends there.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

Surely your gladness need not be the less for the thought that you will one day see a brighter dawn than this - when lovelier sights will meet your eyes than any waving trees or rippling waters - when angel-hands shall undrawn your curtains, and sweeter tones than ever loving Mother breathed shall wake you to a new and glorious day - and when all the sadness, and the sin, that darkened life on this little earth, shall be forgotten like the dreams of a night that is past!

I thought about how mothers feed their babies with tiny little spoons and forks so I wondered, what do Chinese mothers use? Toothpicks?

It takes a woman twenty years to make a man of her son, and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him.

I blame my mother for my poor sex life. All she told me was, “the man goes on top and the woman underneath.” For three years my husband and I slept on bunk beds.

A suburban mother’s role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.

My mother hated me. Once she took me to an orphanage and told me to mingle.

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.

Men are what their mothers made them.

His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.

Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president, but they don't want them to become politicians in the process.

The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.