Motherhood

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

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

As is the mother, so is her daughter. - The Bible, Ezekiel 16:44

I attribute my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education which I received from my mother. - George Washington

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

Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be. - Clementine Paddleford

My mother used to say, "He who angers you, conquers you!" But my mother was a saint. - Elizabeth Kenny

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much.  - Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

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 life.  - Maureen Hawkins

When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race.  - Margaret Sanger

She was the archetypal selfless mother: living only for her children, sheltering them from the consequences of their actions -- and in the end doing them irreparable harm. - Marcia Muller

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see -- or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read. - Alice Walker

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

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

When a woman is twenty, a child deforms her; when she is thirty, he preserves her; and when forty, he makes her young again. - Léon Blum

We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings. - F.H. Bradley

Some 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

To have a son in wartime is the worst curse that can befall a mother, no matter what anyone says. - Slavenka Drakulic

I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met. - Marguerite Duras

No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children. - Barbara Ehrenreich

But the mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man. - George Eliot

The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. 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 to become fully independent.  - Erich Fromm

I opine..."Judicious mothers will always keep in mind, that they are the first book read, and the last put aside, in every child's library."  - C. Lenox Redmond

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

Lord Illingworth: All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. Mrs. Allonby: No man does. That is his. - Oscar Wilde

What a mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin. - Holbrook Jackson

Only mothers can think of the future, because they give birth to it in their children. - Maxim Gorky

God sends children to enlarge our hearts, and to make us unselfish and full of kindly sympathies and affections. - Mary Howitt

My own mother died when I was 10 years old. My folks have told me that what little humor I have comes from her. I can't remember her humor, but I can remember her love and understanding of me. - Will Rogers

No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. (from 'The Measure of My Days') - Florida Scott-Maxwell