Mother's Quotes

A daughter is a mother's gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of her self. And mothers are their daughters' role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships. - Victoria Secunda

A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all. -Washington Irving

A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.

A little girl, asked where her home was, replied, "where mother is." - Keith L. Brooks

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

A man never sees all that his mother has been to him until it's too late to let her know that he sees it. -- W. D. Howells

A man's work is from sun to sun, but a mother's work is never done.

A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child. - Sophia Loren

A mother holds her children's hands for a while, their hearts forever.

A mother is a blend of strength and survivorship, experience and insight, fancy and reflection.

A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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.

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

A mother is like an island in life's ocean vast and wide, a peaceful quiet shelter from the restless tide.

A mother is neither cocky nor proud because she knows the school principle may call at any minute to report that her child has just driven a motorcycle through the gymnasium. - Mary Kay Blakely

A mother is not a person to lean on but a person to make leaning unnecessary. -- Dorothy Canfield Fisher

A mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled. - Emily Dickinson

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

A mother is someone who dreams great dreams for you, but then she lets you chase the dreams you have for yourself and loves you just the same.

A mother is the one through whom God whispers love to His little children.

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

A mother laughs our laughs, sheds our tears, returns our love, fears our fears. She lives our joys, cares our cares and all our hopes and dreams she shares.

A mother loves her children even when they least deserve to be loved. - Kate Samperi

A mother should be like a quilt--keep the children warm but don't smother them.

A mother understands what a child does not say. - Jewish Proverb

A mother who is really a mother is never free. - Honore De Balzac

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

A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on he past in the guise of fond memories. - Honoré de Balzact

A mother's hardest to forgive. Life is the fruit she longs to hand you, Ripe on a plate. And while you live, Relentlessly she understands you. - Phyllis McGinley

A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path. - Agatha Christie

A mother’s love is forever; time, distance, hardship... all fall before the strength of her love.

A mother's love is like a circle. It has no beginning and no ending. It keeps going around and around ever expanding, touching everyone who comes in contact with it. Engulfing them like the morning's mist, warming them like the noontime sun and covering them like a blanket of evening stars. A mother's love is like a circle. It has no beginning and no ending.

A mother's love is not blind; it's just very nearsighted.

A mother's love perceives no impossibilities.

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after. -Peter De Vries

A woman's love is mighty, but a mother's heart is weak, and by its weakness overcomes.- Lowell
All mothers are working mothers.

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

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

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

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children. - Benjamin Disraeli

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy. - Spanish Proverb

An ounce of mother is worth a ton of priest. -- Spanish proverb

Any mother could perform the jobs of several air traffic controllers with ease. - Lisa Alther

Because I feel that in the heavens above
The angels, whispering one to another,
Can find among their burning tears of love,
None so devotional as that of "Mother,
"Therefore, by that dear name I have long called you,
You who are more than mother unto me.-Edgar Allan Poe

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

Being a full-time mother is one of the highest salaried jobs in my field, since the payment is pure love. - Mildred B. Vermont

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

Blessed are the mothers of the earth. They combine the practical and the spiritual into the workable ways of human life. - William L. Stinger

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

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

Children are the sum of what mothers contribute to their lives.

Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character. -- Hosea Ballou

Every beetle is a gazelle in the eyes of its mother. - Moorish Proverb

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

Generally the man with a good wife, or the woman with a good husband, or the children with good parents discover too late the goodness they overlooked while it was in full bloom. - James Douglas

God could not be everywhere, so he created mothers. - Jewish Proverb

Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that suppose to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing. - Toni Morrison

He is a poor son whose sonship does not make him desire to serve all men's mothers. - Harry Emerson Fosdick

Her children arise up, and call her blessed. - Proverbs 31:28

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

I am not a perfect mother and I will never be. You are not a perfect daughter and you will never be. But put us together and we will be the best mother and daughter we would ever be. Zoraida Pesante


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

I demand for the unmarried mother, as a sacred channel of life, the same reverence and respect as for the married mother; for Maternity is a cosmic thing and once it has come to pass, our conversation must not be permitted to blaspheme it. - Ben Lindsey

I look back on my childhood and thank the stars above. For everything you gave me, but mostly for your love. - Wayne F. Winters

I love my mother as the trees love water and sunshine - she helps me grow, prosper, and reach great heights. - Adabella Radici

I miss thee, my Mother! Thy image is stillThe deepest impressed on my heart. - Eliza Cook

I really learned it all from mothers. -- Dr. Benjamin Spock

I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life. - Abraham Lincoln

If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands? Milton Berle

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

If the whole world were put into one scale, and my mother in the other, the whole world would kick the beam. - Lord Langdale (Henry Bickersteth)

If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylum would be filled with mothers. -- Edgar Watson Howe

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

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

It was when I had my first child that I understood how much my mother loved me.

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

It's not easy being a mother. If it were easy, fathers would do it.


Life is the fruit she longs to hand you,Ripe on a plate.And while you live,Relentlessly she understands you.-Phyllis McGinley

Like kites without strings, and butterflies without wings, my mother taught me to soar with my dreams. - William H. McMurry III

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

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

Mom, I love you more than you love me because you have only loved me for a part of your life and I have loved you for all of mine.

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, comrades and friends - but only one mother in the whole world. - Kate Douglas Wiggin

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

Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like. -- Arnold Bennett

Mother is the heartbeat of the home and without her, there seems to be no heart throb.- Leroy Brownlow

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

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

Mother- the essence of loveliness,
The Beauty of a rose,
The sprakle of a dewdrop
And sunset's sweet repose.- Lydia M. Johnson

Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials. - Meryl Streep


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

Motherhood is pricedOf God, at price no man may dareTo lessen or misunderstand.- Helen Hunt Jackson

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

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

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

Mothers are like fine collectibles - as the years go by, they increase in value.

Mothers are the only goddesses in whom the whole world believes.

Mother's arms are made up of tenderness and sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein.

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

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

Mother's love grows by giving. - Charles Lamb

Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. - Erich Fromm

Mother's of little boys work from son up to son down.

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

My mom is literally a part of me. You can't say that about many people except relatives, and organ donors. - Carrie Latet

My mom is the one I love best.
My mom isn't like the rest.
She's funny and she's pretty.
She's kind and she's witty. I
love you! You are the sweetest!

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

My mother had a slender, small body, but a large heart - a heart so large that everybody's joys found welcome in it, and hospitable accommodation. - Mark Twain

My mother is a poemI'll never be able to write,though everything I writeis a poem to my mother.- Sharon Doubiago

My mother is a woman who speaks with her life as much as her tongue. - Kesaya E. Noder

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

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

Never say anything on the phone that you wouldn't want your mother to hear at your trial.-- Sydney Biddle Barrows

Nobody knows how to pamper like a mom. - Calvin, "Calvin and Hobbes"

Nobody knows of the work it makesTo keep the home together.Nobody knows of the steps it takes,Nobody knows-but Mother.

No language could express the power and beauty and heroism of a mother's love.

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

No painter's brush, nor poet's pen
In justice to her fame
Has ever reached half high enough
To write a mother's name.

Now, as always, the most automated appliance in a household is the mother. - Beverly Jones

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

Of all the things that come in numbers; plenty of rainbows, stars in the sky, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles cousins, you have but one mother.

Once in Royal David's city a lowly cattle shed,
Where a mother laid her baby,
In a manger for its bed:
Mary was that mother mid,
Jesus Christ her little child.- Cecil Frances Alexander

One of the very few reasons I had any respect for my mother when I was thirteen was because she would reach into the sink with her bare hands - bare hands - and pick up that lethal gunk and drop it into the garbage. To top that, I saw her reach into the wet garbage bag and fish around in there looking for a lost teaspoon. Bare hands - a kind of mad courage. - Robert Fulghum

One good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters. - George Herbert

One lamp - thy mother's love - amid the stars
Shall lift its pure flame changeless, and before
The throne of God, burn through eternity -
Holy - as it was lit and lent thee here.- Nathaniel Parker Willis

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

Over the years I have learned that motherhood is much like an austere religious order, the joining of which obligates one to relinquish all claims to personal possessions.-- Nancy Stahl

People who exercise their embryonic freedom day after day, little by little, expand that freedom. People who do not will find that it withers until they are literally 'being lived.' They are acting out scripts written by parents, associates, and society. -- Stephen R. Covey

Real mothers know that a child’s growth is not measured by height or years or grades... It is marked by the progression of Mama to Mommy to Mother.

She is strength, She is beauty, She is love... She is my Mom and I love her more than words can say.

She never quite leaves her children at home, even when she doesn't take them along. - Margaret Culkin Banning

Some mothers 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

Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly. - Ambrose Bierce

Take the word "family." Strike out the "m" for mother and the "y" for youth - and all you have left is "fail.” - Omar Burleson

That best academy, a mother's knee. - James Russell Lowell

The angels, whispering to one another can find, among their burning terms of love, none so devotional as that of "Mother. - Edgar Allen Poe

The bearing and the training of a child is woman's wisdom.- Tennyson

The best conversations with mothers always take place in silence, when only the heart speaks. - Carrie Latet

The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes one a mother—which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.-- Sydney J. Harris

The desolation and terror of, for the first time, realizing that the mother can lose you, or you her, and your own abysmal loneliness and helplessness without her. - Francis Thompson

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

The formative period for building character for eternity is in the nursery.

The mother is queen of that realm and sways a scepter more potent than that of kings or priests.
The greatest battle that ever was fought -
Shall I tell you where and when?
On the maps of the world you will find it not:I
t was fought by the mothers of men.- Joakuin Miller

The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world. -- William Ross Wallace

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

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

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


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. - Rajneesh

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

The mother-child relationship is very paradoxical. 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 become fully independent. - Erich Fromm

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

The mother's heart is the child's school-room. - Henry Ward Beecher

The only mothers it is safe to forget on Mother's Day are the good ones. - Mignon McLaughlin

The only thing a lawyer won't question is the legitimacy of his mother. -- W. C. Fields

The phrase "working mother" is redundant. - Jane Sellman

The precursor of the mirror is the mother's face. - D.W. Winnicott

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

The story of a mother's life: Trapped between a scream and a hug. - Cathy Guisewite

The sweetest sounds to mortals givenAre heard in Mother, Home, and Heaven.- William Goldsmith Brown

The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated. - Washington Irving

The two most important things a mother can give a child are first roots and then wings.

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One is roots; the other, wings. - Hodding Carter, Jr

There is no friendship, no love like that of the mother for her child.

There is no influence so powerful as that of a mother, but next in rank in efficacy is that of a schoolmaster. - Sarah Josepha Hale

There never was a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him asleep. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

There is so much to teach, and the time goes so fast.- Erma Bombeck

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

There's nothing like a mama-hug. ~Adabella Radici

Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in theeCalls back the lovely April of her prime.~William Shakespeare

Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.- Will Durant

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

To my Mother ~ Elizabeth Mary, who is not with me anymore, On Mother's Day and always... ...my heart remembers you. Much love always, love from your ever loving daughter Elaine Mary Berger.

We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful. Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.-- Mary Antin

We have a beautiful mother
Her green lap immense
Her brown embrace eternal
Her blue body everything we know.- Alice Walker

We only have One Mom, One Mommy, One Mother in this World, One life. Don't wait for the Tomorrow's to tell Mom, you love her.

What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, fixed in permanent outline forever? - Thomas Wentworth Higginson

What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin.-- Henry Ward Beecher

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not. - James Joyce

When God thought of Mother, he must have laughed satisfaction and framed it quickly--so rich, so deep, so divine, so full of soul, power, and beauty was the conception.

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

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. -- Pablo Picasso

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

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

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

With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood. - Isadora Duncan

Women are aristocrats, and it is always the mother who makes us feel that we belong to the better sort. - John Lancaster Spalding

Women as the guardians of children possess a great power. They are the moulders of their children's personalities and the arbiters of their development. - Ann Oakley

Women know
The way to rear up children (to be just)
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words.~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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

Women who miscalculate are called mothers. - Abigail Van Buren

Women's Liberation is just a lot of foolishness. It's the men who are discriminated against. They can't bear children. And no one's likely to do anything about that. - Golda Meir

You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular. - Robert Frost

You never realize how much your mother loves you till you explore the attic - and find every letter you ever sent her, every finger painting, clay pot, bead necklace, Easter chicken, cardboard Santa Claus, paperlace Mother's Day card and school report since day one. - Pam Brown

Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all. - Oliver Wendell Holmes