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
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
Youth fades – love droops – the leaves of friendship fall – a mother’s secret hope outlives them all. – Oliver Wendell Holmes
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
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
My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it. – 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
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
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
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
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 – 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
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
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
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 person-hood 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
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
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
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 – and a woman makes a home. – Arthur Guiterman
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
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. Breast-feeding 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
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
The story of a mother’s life – Trapped between a scream and a hug. – Cathy Guisewite
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 Hoffma
Mother is the heartbeat in the home – and without her, there seems to be no heart throb. – Leroy Brownlow
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