ode to mothers

i stumbled across these quotes on motherhood... many of them a challenge for me to do my job well. i dedicate this to all the mommies i know who have demonstrated such virtues...
happy mother's day!!!

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. ~Author Unknown

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

Being a full-time mother is one of the highest salaried jobs in my field, since the payment is pure love. ~Mildred B. Vermont

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

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

If the whole world were put into one scale, and my mother in the other, the whole world would kick the beam. ~Lord Langdale (Henry Bickersteth)

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

A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother. ~Author Unknown

Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly. ~Ambrose Bierce

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

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

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his. ~Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895

He is a poor son whose sonship does not make him desire to serve all men's mothers. ~Harry Emerson Fosdick

Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.
~William Shakespeare

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy. ~Spanish Proverb

She never quite leaves her children at home, even when she doesn't take them along. ~Margaret Culkin Banning

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, Women and Beauty

If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands? ~Milton Berle

Motherhood is priced
Of God, at price no man may dare
To lessen or misunderstand.
~Helen Hunt Jackson

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own. ~Aristotle

Women are aristocrats, and it is always the mother who makes us feel that we belong to the better sort. ~John Lancaster Spalding

Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials. ~Meryl Streep

The sweetest sounds to mortals given
Are heard in Mother, Home, and Heaven.
~William Goldsmith Brown

What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, fixed in permanent outline forever? ~Thomas Wentworth Higginson

My mom is a neverending song in my heart of comfort, happiness, and being. I may sometimes forget the words but I always remember the tune. ~Graycie Harmon

Mother love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible. ~Marion C. Garretty

I love my mother as the trees love water and sunshine - she helps me grow, prosper, and reach great heights. ~Adabella Radici

[A] mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled. ~Emily Dickinson

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 trouble thickens 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

Any mother could perform the jobs of several air traffic controllers with ease. ~Lisa Alther

Now, as always, the most automated appliance in a household is the mother.
~Beverly Jones

That best academy, a mother's knee. ~James Russell Lowell

A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
~Victor Hugo

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, Beloved, 1987

The only mothers it is safe to forget on Mother's Day are the good ones.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
~Honoré de Balzac

My mother is a poem
I'll never be able to write,
though everything I write
is a poem to my mother.
~Sharon Doubiago

With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.
~Isadora Duncan

One good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters. ~George Herbert

There's nothing like a mama-hug. ~Adabella Radici

Who fed me from her gentle breast
And hushed me in her arms to rest,
And on my cheek sweet kisses prest?
My Mother.
~Anne Taylor

Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.
~Erich Fromm

Who ran to help me when I fell,
And would some pretty story tell,
Or kiss the place to make it well?
My mother.
~Ann Taylor

Mother - that was the bank where we deposited all our hurts and our worries.
~T. DeWitt Talmage

The precursor of the mirror is the mother's face. ~D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 1971

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.
~William Makepeace Thackeray

A daughter is a mother's gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of her self. And mothers are their daughters' role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships. ~Victoria Secunda

Mother's love grows by giving. ~Charles Lamb

I miss thee, my Mother! Thy image is still
The deepest impressed on my heart.
~Eliza Cook

The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated. ~Washington Irving

I cannot forget my mother. [S]he is my bridge. When I needed to get across, she steadied herself long enough for me to run across safely.
~Renita Weems

A little girl, asked where her home was, replied, "where mother is."
~Keith L. Brooks

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

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, comrades and friends - but only one mother in the whole world. ~Kate Douglas Wiggin

If I was damned of body and soul,
I know whose prayers would make me whole,
Mother o' mine, O mother o'mine.
~Rudyard Kipling

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not. ~James Joyce

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

The mother's heart is the child's school-room. ~Henry Ward Beecher

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

My mom is literally a part of me. You can't say that about many people except relatives, and organ donors. ~Carrie Latet

Every beetle is a gazelle in the eyes of its mother. ~Moorish Proverb

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

No painter's brush, nor poet's pen
In justice to her fame
Has ever reached half high enough
To write a mother's name.
~Author Unknown

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

One lamp - thy mother's love - amid the stars
Shall lift its pure flame changeless, and before
The throne of God, burn through eternity -
Holy - as it was lit and lent thee here.
~Nathaniel Parker Willis

Life is the fruit she longs to hand you,
Ripe on a plate.
And while you live,
Relentlessly she understands you.
~Phyllis McGinley

Because I feel that in the heavens above
The angels, whispering one to another,
Can find among their burning tears of love,
None so devotional as that of "Mother,"
Therefore, by that dear name I have long called you,
You who are more than mother unto me.
~Edgar Allan Poe

The best conversations with mothers always take place in silence, when only the heart speaks. ~Carrie Latet

Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother. ~Oprah Winfrey