Popular quotes about Mothers! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 34
All mothers love their own children as best they can, according to their temperament and circumstances, and all mothers should have done better, in their children's eyes, when the going gets tough for the children.
Fay WeldonI think we spend a lot of time denying our mothers. We understand other women earlier than we understand our mothers because we're trying so hard to say, "I'm not going to be like my mother" that we blame her for her condition. If we didn't blame her for her condition, we would have to admit that it could happen to us, too. I spent a long time doing that, thinking that my mother's problems were uniquely her fault.
Gloria SteinemMothers have not always had the most important role in their children's upbringing, when they had other economic roles to play. Inpast centuries, fathers were the key parent in the upbringing of the next generation, because moral training, not emotional sensitivity, was thought to be central to successful child-rearing. Mothers were thought to corrupt their little ones with too much affection and not enough stern training.
Sandra ScarrRecently I reviewed the history of many missionaries and found a powerful correlation between exceptional missionaries and mothers who chose to remain home, often at great financial and personal sacrifice...They reflect honor to mothers who sacrificed to remain home for their children's benefit.
Richard G. ScottAll mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.
Boris PasternakOf course, Lady Arabella could not suckle the young heir herself. Ladies Arabella never can. They are gifted with the powers of being mothers, but not nursing mothers. Nature gives them bosoms for show, but not for use. So Lady Arabella had a wet-nurse.
Anthony TrollopeWhat's really fun is seeing mothers bringing their daughters to the shows. And the best part is the mothers know they don't have to worry about sexual innuendo in the songs. The shows are family shows.
Peter NooneWhen women feel they have learned to forgive their mothers - and men, their fathers - all it usually means is that they've decided to allow themselves the same kind of behavior.
Mignon McLaughlinLike all mothers, mother nature is delighted to keep in touch with you when you're appearing in hit tv shows like BJ and the bear and My Two Dads but when you suddenly find yourself hosting When Insects Attack, oh she becomes strangely distant.
Greg EviganWhat good is it to me that Mary gave birth to the son of God fourteen hundred years ago, and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture? We are all meant to be mothers of God. God is always needing to be born.
Meister EckhartSisters, while they are growing up, tend to be very rivalrous and as young mothers they are given to continual rivalrous comparisons of their several children. But once the children grow older, sisters draw closer together and often, in old age, they become each other's chosen and most happy companions. In addition to their shared memories of childhood and of their relationship to each other's children, they share memories of the same home, the same homemaking style, and the same small prejudices about housekeeping that carry the echoes of their mother's voice.
Margaret MeadAnd he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.
Edith WhartonYou are doing God's work. You are doing it wonderfully well. He is blessing you, and He will bless you, --even--no, -especially--when your days and your nights may be most challenging. Like the woman who anonymously, meekly, perhaps even with hesitation and some embarrassment, fought her way through the crowd just to touch the hem of the Master's garment, so Christ will say to the women who worry and wonder and weep over their responsibility as mothers, `Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole.' And it will make your children whole as well.
Jeffrey R. HollandMothers and grandmothers: these are the people that I admire most, not so much chefs.
Yotam OttolenghiVery often mothers go to work right away after the child is born and, unless the father or someone else stays home, this is quite serious. A baby has to be near its kin most of the time when he is little for three, four or five years. To give him this grounding, this feeling of connection, this feeling of relationship, is the most important thing.
Laura HuxleyI adore going to movie sets and being part of a team trying to create something. And yet, I hate to miss even one bedtime with my girls. . . My sisters both are working mothers. I understand that my being an actress as well as being at home isn't some heroic thing. That doesn't mean it isn't confusing or difficult--especially that question of how you find a balance.
Jennifer GarnerWhat interests me, ... is why people are so repelled when, after all, everyone started life attached. In a sense, the twins have never been born because they are still tied by an umbilical cord. Relationships between women - daughters, mothers, friends - are one of my strong interests.
Judith Perelman RossnerMorality becomes hypocrisy if it means accepting mothers' suffering or dying in connection with unwanted pregnancies and illegal abortions and unwanted children
Gro Harlem BrundtlandI can't stand stage mothers. It doesn't work. You definitely feel that with the new generation of pop stars right now they've all managed to work it out for themselves. You have to have confidence in that. When you're young, you know your market better than I will. I love having young people on the show because I can learn from them.
Simon CowellI just have a more holistic sense of what it means to be for life, knowing that life does not just begin at conception and end at birth, and that if I am going to discourage abortion, I had better be ready to adopt some babies and care for some mothers.
Shane ClaiborneBut now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony - forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?
Erich Maria RemarqueWomen, in all fields - whether mothers or not - still encounter an extraordinary number of obstacles. They have to hold too many things together and often sacrifice their aspirations in the name of affections.
Elena FerranteThe task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
John D. RockefellerWith infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great grandparents, great-auntsโฆand so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his ownโฆSuch is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.
Alan LightmanMothers are likely to have more bad days on the job than most other professionals, considering the hours: round-the-clock, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. . . . You go to work when you're sick, maybe even clinically depressed, because motherhood is perhaps the only unpaid position where failure to show up can result in arrest.
Mary BlakelyWe must not forget that these men and women who file through the narrow gates at Ellis Island, hopeful, confused, with bundles of misconceptions as heavy as the great sacks upon their backs these simple, rough-handed people are the ancestors of our descendants, the fathers and mothers of our children.
Walter WeylThe more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.
Noam ChomskyThe transept belfry and the two towers were to him three great cages, the birds in which, taught by him, would sing for him alone. Yet it was these same bells which had made him deaf; but mothers are often fondest of the child who has made them suffer most.
Victor HugoLove is the very essence of family life. Why is it that the children we love become so frequently the targets of our harsh words? Why is it that these children who love their fathers and mothers sometimes speak as if with daggers that cut to the quick? "There is beauty all around," only when there's love at home.
Gordon B. HinckleyBesides, I'd heard too many Karen Carpenter tales at Gladstone PTA meetings, and they often took the form of boasts. The prestigious diagnosis of anorexia seemed much coveted not only by the students but by their mothers, who would compete over whose daughter ate less. No wonder the poor girls were a mess.
Lionel ShriverThere will never be a generation of great men until there has been a generation of free women - of free mothers.
Robert Green IngersollI think there's an unnatural amount of social pressure on women, particularly mothers, to conform to certain standards of behavior, particularly in regard to our children.
Jillian MedoffThe time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.
Arthur C. ClarkeWe 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 JamisonAs motherhood as a "private enterprise" declines and more mothers rely on the work of lower-paid specialists, the value accorded the work of mothering (not the value of children) has declined for women, making it all the harder for men to take it up.
Arlie Russell HochschildAfter three years down here, I've not learned too much. But one thing I do know is that our bellies aren't big enough for revenge. It turns sour and eats you up. We'll get out, but we'll get out for the sun, the moon, and mothers, not for small-souled enemies, though we'll deal with them when we get there.
N.D. WilsonHe is a poor son whose sonship does not make him desire to serve all men's mothers.
Harry Emerson FosdickGuns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.
Tom DeLayI was fascinated to think about a place where men could be the mothers and I thought of my own song-writing and I decided to have a relationship with their daughters.
Tori AmosWhat fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.
Margaret AtwoodStrange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework --an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.
Betty Friedan