Mother’s Day Thoughts

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biological possibility and desire are not the same as biological need. Women have childbearing equipment. For them to choose not to use the equipment is no more blocking what is instinctive than it is for a man who, muscles or no, chooses not to be a weightlifter.
Betty Rollin

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

All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysis and to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defense. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health.
Germaine Greer

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

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

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

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.
Barbara Kingsolver


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

If the whole world were put into one scale, and my mother in the other, the whole world would kick the beam.

Henry Bickersteth

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

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

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

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

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