Popular quotes about Mothers! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 3
all daughters, even when most aggravated by their mothers, have a secret respect for them. They believe perhaps that they can do everything better than their mothers can, and many things they can do better, but they have not yet lived long enough to be sure how successfully they will meet the major emergencies of life, which lie, sometimes quite creditably, behind their mothers.
Phyllis BottomeI'm not a good father and they're not children any more; the eldest is in his fifties. My relationship with their mothers broke down and, because of what the law was, they went with their mothers and were imbued with their mothers' morality in life and they were not my people any more.
Wilbur SmithMothers were much too sharp. They were like dogs. Buster always sensed when anything was out of the ordinary, and so did mothers. Mothers and dogs both had a kind of second sight that made them see into people's minds and know when anything unusual was going on.
Enid BlytonMothers seem to be in subtle competition with teachers. There is always an underlying fear that teachers will do a better job thanthey have done with their child.... But mostly mothers feel that their areas of competence are very much similar to those of the teacher. In fact they feel they know their child better than anyone else and that the teacher doesn't possess any special field of authority or expertise.
Sara Lawrence-LightfootHere's the progression. Feminism won; you can have it all; of course you want children; mothers are better at raising children than fathers; of course your children come first; of course you come last; today's children need constant attention, cultivation, and adoration, or they'll become failures and hate you forever; you don't want to fail at that; it's easier for mothers to abandon their work and their dreams than for fathers; you don't want it all anymore (which is good because you can't have it all); who cares about equality, you're too tired; and whoops--here we are in 1954.
Susan J. DouglasI just imagined how fine it would be if the children could adopt mothers, of course, mothers who were single, without other children, living in a comfortable apartment, and ready to care for the children.
Lidija DimkovskaMuch of the ill-tempered railing against women that has characterized the popular writing of the last two years is a half-heartedattempt to find a way back to a more balanced relationship between our biological selves and the world we have built. So women are scolded both for being mothers and for not being mothers, for wanting to eat their cake and have it too, and for not wanting to eat their cake and have it too.
Margaret MeadOne cannot understand what's happening to women in the Middle East if they don't realize that the mothers are a strong, progressive force. The mothers push the daughters to get out of the harem, to get the education, to achieve what they could not even dream of.
Fatema MernissiAn ethic of maternalism was central to the utopianism of 19th century feminists. I don't think that today's women see motherhood as a source of personal power, let alone political power. I don't think that women now have that same sense that their lives as mothers gives them any special power or virtue. I think women see their lives as mothers as an adjunct to their working lives - a fulfilling and important adjunct, to be sure - but something they do in addition to working in the public realm, not because being a wife and mother gives them a distinct edge in improving the world as we know it.
Clare WrightI'm not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I'm against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children.
Simone de BeauvoirAll mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.
Boris PasternakI was called a misogynist because I was reducing women to mothers. 'Reducing women to mothers' โ now there is possibly the most anti-women statement I've heard.
Steven MoffatOne of the darkest, deepest shames so many of us mothers feel nowadays is our fear that we are Bad Mothers, that we are failing our children and falling far short of our own ideals.
Ayelet WaldmanRonald Reagan perfected the subtler version long ago by talking about "welfare mothers" - a code phrase for people of colour.
Adam HochschildWithout my women friends, I wouldn't know anything. They've been my teachers and my mothers. My mother was a wonderful person, but she didn't give me a lot of the stuff I needed to advance myself as an adult woman. I have a really strong group of girlfriends, and we share a lot with one another - the complications of raising children, marriages, personal and physical struggles.
Jamie Lee CurtisIf there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers.
E. W. HoweMothers really were not built to raise babies not only by themselves, but with only a partner. For millions of years, a woman had much more than just her husband to help rear her young... This whole idea of 'it takes a village to raise a child' is exactly how we're supposed to live.
Helen FisherWomen's rights in essence is really a movement for freedom, a movement for equality, for the dignity of all women, for those who work outside the home and those who dedicate themselves with more altruism than any profession I know to being wives and mothers, cooks and chauffeurs, and child psychologists and loving human beings.
William RuckelshausThere is nothing more important to our survival, nothing more dignified than learning how to take care of others, how to serve and teach people with kindness and openness. Mothers are experts in these fields. I hope people can learn to listen to them, learn to be like them and acknowledge the wisdom there before it is too late. I hope people can learn how to serve others.
Samantha HuntMothers have a habit of proving right except you don't find that out until you're the age your mother was when she gave you the advice.
Rita Mae BrownNo fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.
Miguel de CervantesThere's two kind of cherries, and two kind of fairies, and two kind of mothers I'm told.
Merle HaggardWe inherit a lot from our parents: mom's eyes, dad's chin, and the attitude of whichever parent isn't punishing you at the moment. All of those things we have our mom's to thank for."If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?"
Milton BerleMorality measured in centimeters: all mothers believe that only their daughters dance decently.
Jose BergaminLearning is good in and of itself...the mothers of the Jewish ghettoes of the east would pour honey on a book so the children would know that learning is sweet. And the parents who settled hungry Kansas would take their children in from the fields when a teacher came.
George H. W. BushWe take a lot for granted as second wave feminists, what our mothers and aunts did for us.
Vera FarmigaMothers always find ways to fit in the work - but then when you're working, you feel that you should be spending time with your children and then when you're with your children, you're thinking about working.
Alice HoffmanAll the laws and legislation in the world will never heal this world like the loving hearts and arms of mothers and fathers. If every child could drift to sleep feeling wrapped in the love of their family - and God's love - this world would be a far more gentle and better place.
Mitt RomneyThere will never be a generation of great men until there has been a generation of free women - of free mothers.
Robert Green IngersollWe don't want to be wounds ("No, you're the wound!") but we should be allowed to have them, to speak about having them, to be something more than just another girl who has one. We should be able to do these things without failing the feminism of our mothers, and we should be able to represent women who hurt without walking backward into a voyeuristic rehashing of the old cultural models.
Leslie JamisonThere seems to be a hole in the culture where mothers went. Then, when their kids went off to school or stopped having ear infections every three weeks, they emerged from the mother zone, and like everyone else, they forgot where they'd been. Amnesia surrounding motherhood is the rule, not the exception.
Marni JacksonThere's so many things going on in the world, Babies dying. Mothers crying. How much oil is one human life worth. And what ever happened to peace on earth.
Willie NelsonAlthough the needs of babies have changed very little over the millennia, over the past decades, female equality in education and occupational opportunities has altered maternal expectations. This renders baby-care requirements discordant with ambition for many mothers, and produces heartfelt dilemmas for others.
Joan Raphael-LeffHousekeepers, homemakers, wives, and mothers are fundamental social relations, which rest upon woman's characteristics, physical, mental, and moral.
R. Heber NewtonI get crazy upset when I feel mothers or babies are not getting the loving care they need.
Robin LimMarriageable girls as well as mothers understand the terms and perils of the lottery called wedlock. That is why women weep at a wedding and men smile.
Honore de BalzacWe are all conceived in close prison; in our mothers wombs, we are close prisoners all; when we are born, we are born but to the liberty of the house; prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death.
John DonneWhatever the era...one thing will never change: Fathers and mothers, if you have children, they must come first.
Barbara BushI watched her for a long time, memorizing her shoulders, her long-legged gait. This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren't crying, that it wasn't the worst day of their lives. That they didn't want their mothers to come running after them, begging their forgiveness, that they wouldn't have gone down on their knees and thanked god if they could stay.
Janet FitchThe capitalist class shoots down mothers and children. It stops at nothing, no matter how monstrous, to prevent the organization of the workers.
Ella Reeve BloorBe a Mother who is committed to loving her children into standing on higher ground than the environment surrounding them. Mothers are endowed with a love that is unlike any other love on the face of the earth.
Marjorie Pay HinckleyI'm amazed when I see mothers wearing high heels. If your kids run off you can't run after them.
Claudia SchifferHow simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.
Alice WalkerChrist subjected himself to the law of the seed in the earth, to the law of rest and growth. He was "one of the children of the year," growing through rest, secret in his mothers womb, receiving the warmth of the sun through her, living the life of dependence, helplessness, littleness, darkness, and silence which, by a mystery of the Eternal Law, is the life of natural growth.
Caryll HouselanderThere is a huge boom in autism right now because inattentive mothers and competitive dads want an explanation for why their dumb-ass kids can't compete academically, so they throw money into the happy laps of shrinks . . . to get back diagnoses that help explain away the deficiencies of their junior morons. I don't give a [bleep] what these crackerjack whack jobs tell you - yer kid is NOT autistic. He's just stupid. Or lazy. Or both.
Denis LearyYou can't make flivers without steel - and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they pratically can't help behaving as they ought to behave.
Aldous Huxley