Motherhood Quotes

Remember, you can lead a fifty-seven-year-old body to motherhood, but you can't make it stay awake.

Give me a different set of mothers and I will give you a different world

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

Women have millions of years of genetically-enc oded intelligences, intuitions, capacities, knowledges, powers, and cellular knowings of exactly what to do with the infant.

Mothers easily become jealous of their sons' friends when they are particularly successful. As a rule a mother loves herself in her son more than she does the son himself.

And because I love this lifeI know I shall love death as wellThe child cries out whenFrom the right breast the motherTakes it away, in the very next momentTo find in the left oneIts consolation.

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

You never hear of a mother cursing the child; she is forgiving, always forgiving.

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

...mothers are often fondest of the child which has caused them the greatest pain.

Any sane person would have left long ago. But I cannot. I have my sons.

Mother, you had me, but I never had you.

It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.

The art of never making a mistake is crucial to motherhood. To be effective and to gain the respect she needs to function, a mother must have her children believe she has never engaged in sex, never made a bad decision, never caused her own mother a moment's anxiety, and was never a child.

Mother: the most beautiful word on the lips of mankind.

My mother was a woman. A black woman. A single mother. Raising two kids on her own. So she was dark skinned. Had short hair. Got no love from nobody except for a group called the Black Panthers. So that's why she was a Black Panther.

No self-respecting mother would run out of intimidations on the eve of a major holiday.

Let France have good mothers, and she will have good sons.

Everyone carries within himself an image of womanliness derived from his mother: it is this that determines whether, on the whole,he will revere women, or despise them, or remain generally indifferent to them.

The doctors advised me not to have even one. My health was still not good, and they said that pregnancy might be fatal. If they hadn't said that to me, maybe I wouldn't have got married. But that diagnosis provoked me, it infuriated me. I answered, 'Why do you think I'm getting married if not to have children? I don't want to hear that I can't have children; I want you to tell me what I have to do in order to have children!'

But a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it does not matter which as far as one's knowledge of her is concerned: the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning.

A mother would never by choice sleep in a wet bed but she would gladly do so in order to spare the dry bed for her child.

Drawing ... is an innocent & engaging amusement, often useful, and a qualification not to be neglected in one who is to become a mother & an instructor.

I've never hit a woman in my life. Not even my own mother.

Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother.

We [women] have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that ... takes time.

Men are what their mothers made them.

Someday, when my children are old enough to understand the logic that motivates a mother, I'll tell them: I loved you enough to bug you about where you were going, with whom and what time you would get home. ... I loved you enough to be silent and let you discover your friend was a creep. I loved you enough to make you return a Milky Way with a bite out of it to a drugstore and confess, 'I stole this.' ... But most of all I loved you enough to say no when you hated me for it. That was the hardest part of all.

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.

Women been gittin' pregnant ever since Eve ate that apple.

For we think back through our mothers if we are women.

When teachers or people in authority put me down or in one way or another tried to make me feel less than equal to what they thought I should be - my mother was on my side. It was amazing.

I've never understood women who, because of their children, pose as victims and don't allow themselves any other activities.

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal.

To play down mothering as small is to crack the very foundation on which greatness stands.

Everyone is guilty at one time or another of throwing out questions that beg to be ignored, but mothers seem to have a market on the supply. "Do you want a spanking or do you want to go to bed?" Don't you want to save some of the pizza for your brother?" Wasn't there any change?

As bad as I was, as much trouble and worry as I caused my mother, I loved her.

The duty of motherhood, which the vast majority of woman will always undertake, requires the qualities which men need not possess.

The thing I want more than anything else? I want to have children. I used to feel for every child I had, I would adopt another.

I took a long period off to be a mom.

Being a mother means that your heart is no longer yours; it wanders wherever your children do

"Baby, you know?" my mother once said to me. "I think you're the greatest woman I've ever met - and I'm not including my mother or Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt in that." She said, "You are very intelligent and you're very kind, and those two qualities do not often go together." Then she went across the street and got in her car, and I went the other way down to the streetcar. I thought, "Suppose she's right. She's intelligent - and she's too mean to lie." You see, a parent has the chance - and maybe the responsibility - to liberate her child. And my mom had liberated me when I was 17.

I do not think that I am a natural born mother... If I ever wanted to mother anyone, it was my father.

My mother is so full of joy and life. I am her child. And that is better than being the child of anyone else in the world.

It's [motherhood] the biggest on-the-job- training program in existence today.

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.

I will look after you and I will look after anybody you say needs to be looked after, any way you say. I am here. I brought my whole self to you. I am your mother.

Most women put off entertaining until the kids are grown.

Giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child. Then the mother is born.

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

All I ever learned at my mother's knee was what a bony knee looked like.

It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.

It had never occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work til it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But is was so, and after all, he thought, why not?

...but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.

Some mothers need happy children; others need unhappy ones-otherwise they cannot prove their maternal virtues.

Alone of human beings the good and wise mother stands on a plane of equal honor with the bravest soldier; for she has gladly gone down to the brink of the chasm of darkness to bring back the children in whose hands rests the future of the years.

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

Who in their infinite wisdom decreed that Little League uniforms be white? Certainly not a mother.

In middle school, my friends decided I was weird, and they didn’t like my hair. They ditched me and talked behind my back, which is cool — I’m over it. [laughs] One time I called them and said, “Hey, do you want to go to the Berkshire Mall?” They all gave me excuses and said no. So I go to the mall with my mom, and don’t you know, we run into all of them. Together. Shopping. My mom could see I was about to cry, so she said, “You know what? We’re going to the King of Prussia mall,” which was the mecca.