The only mothers it is safe to forget on Mother’s Day are the good ones.
—Mignon McLaughlin (1913–83) American Journalist, Author
He is a poor son whose sonship does not make him desire to serve all men’s mothers.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969) American Baptist Minister
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 (1892–1973) American Novelist, Human Rights Activist
There are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you’re faced with somebody whose needs won’t be put off.
—Angela Carter (1940–92) English Novelist
Let France have good mothers, and she will have good sons.
—Napoleon I (1769–1821) Emperor of France
All mothers are physically handicapped. They have only two hands.
—Anonymous
A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
—Victor Hugo (1802–85) French Novelist
A mother understands what a child does not say.
—Hebrew Proverb
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
What are Raphael’s Madonnas but the shadow of a mother’s love, fixed in permanent outline forever?
—Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911) American Social Reformer, Clergyman
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 rejoiced 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 (1783–1859) American Essayist, Biographer, Historian
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 (1835–1910) American Humorist
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.
—Unknown
Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b.1941) American Social Critic, Essayist
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 (b.1934) Italian Actor
Men never think, at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through this very often. God’s will be done, and if He decrees that we are to have a great number of children why we must try to bring them up as useful and exemplary members of society.
—Queen Victoria (1819–1901) British Royal
All mothers are working mothers.
—Unknown
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 (b.1939) Australia Academic, Journalist, Scholar, Writer
The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint.
—James Fenton
Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.
—Erich Fromm (1900–80) German-American Psychoanalyst, Social Philosopher
How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.
—Alice Walker (b.1944) American Novelist, Activist
Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother.
—Oprah Winfrey (b.1954) American TV Personality
An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.
—Spanish Proverb
For that’s what a woman, a mother wants—to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it’s safer for them to be interested in other people’s happiness than to believe in their own.
—Marguerite Duras (1914–96) French Novelist, Playwright
A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.
—Unknown
Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616) British Playwright
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 (1898–1978) Israeli Head of State
Motherhood is priced
Of God, at price no man may dare
To lessen or misunderstand.
—Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–85) American Novelist, Civil Rights Activist
He that would the daughter win must with the mother first begin.
—English Proverb
Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.
—William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63) English Novelist
If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?
—Milton Berle (1908–2002) American Comedian, Actor
A father may turn his back on his child; brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies; husbands may desert their wives, and wives their husbands. But a mother’s love endures through all; in. good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world’s condemnation, a mother still loves on, and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still she remembers the infant smiles that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful shout of his childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can never be brought to think him all unworthy.
—Washington Irving (1783–1859) American Essayist, Biographer, Historian
The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom.
—Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87) American Clergyman, Writer
I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhood 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 (1914–96) French Novelist, Playwright
A mother’s heart is always with her children.
—Common Proverb
The Enemy, who wears her mother’s usual face and confidential tone, has access; doubtless stares into her writing case and listens on the phone.
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–78) American Children’s Books Writer, Poet, Writer of Children’s Books
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 S. Truman (1884–1972) American Head of State
Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.
—Ann Oakley (b.1944) English Sociologist, Writer, Feminist
The watchful mother tarries nigh, though sleep has closed her infants eyes.
—John Keble (1792–1866) English Religious Leader
Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.
—James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish Novelist, Poet
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 (b.1937) American Unitarian Universalist Author, Essayist, Clergyman
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 (b.1941) American Social Critic, Essayist
Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913) American Short-story Writer, Journalist
The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty. From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) American Feminist, Writer
There is a point where you aren’t as much mom and daughter as you are adults and friends. It doesn’t happen for everyone—but it did for Mom and me.
—Jamie Lee Curtis (b.1958) American Film Actress, Children’s Books Writer
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 (1806–61) English Poet
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 (1859–1907) English Poet, Ascetic
Most mothers are instinctive philosophers.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96) American Abolitionist, Author
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 (1931–2019) American Novelist, Editor, Academic
With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.
—Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) American Dancer, Choreographer