Mother quotes
11.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"If your mother tells you to do a thing, it is wrong to reply that you won't. It is better and more becoming to intimate that you will do as she bids you, and then afterwards act quietly in the matter according to the dictates of your better judgment."
"My mother, who was radiant, young, and beautiful even as she lay dying, heard voices and saw visions, but she always managed to make friends with them and was much too charming to hospitalize even at her craziest."
"On Becoming a 'Lady': What every mother wants her daughter to be."
"I didn't major in anthropology in college, but I do feel I had an education in different cultures very early on. My parents divorced when I was eleven, and my father immediately married a woman with three children and was with her for five years. When they got divorced, he immediately married a woman with four children. In the meantime, my mother married a man who had seven children. So I was going from one family to another between the ages of eleven and eighteen."
"Of the many rights of ladies, the best should be to be considered a mother."
"My father was slower, but he was severer than my mother, who was quick but light and irregular in discipline."
"My father required me to honor my father and my mother too much to put up games on them. I did on occasion."
"Sweet mother of chaos," he breathed. "Rachel, you are indeed one of us. Have your time in the sun. You're worth the extra wait."
"My mother isn't crazy. She simply has a harder time than most reconciling her reality with everyone else's reality."
"You tried to slide his original curse back onto him?” Al said in wonder. “At the restaurant? And I stopped you? Sweet mother pus bucket!” he exclaimed, and I swear, dust sifted from the ceiling. “Rachel, we have to work on this communication thing."
"Rachel, you take her,” my mother said, clearly uncomfortable. “She might like you.” “No. Mom, no!” I protested, but it was my mother we were talking about, and it was either take the baby or have her hit the floor."
"A mother would have been always present. A mother would have been a constant friend; her influence would have been beyond all other."
"I have had to contend against the unkindness of his sister, and the insolence of his mother; and have suffered the punishment of an attachment, without enjoying its advantages."
"You are very kind in planning presents for me to make, and my mother has shown me exactly the same attention; but as I do not choose to have generosity dictated to me, I shall not resolve on giving my cabinet to Anna till the first thought of it has been my own."
"I take no leave of you, Miss Bennet: I send no compliments to your mother. You deserve no such attention. I am most seriously displeased."
"Fortunately for those who pay their court through such foibles, a fond mother, though, in pursuit of praise for her children, the most rapacious of human beings, is likewise the most credulous; her demands are exorbitant; but she will swallow any thing."
"She knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next: that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect."
"You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that to torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonymous words."
"There are good mothers and bad ones, but most of them are somewhere in-between."
"The person who has the most influence on me is my mother. Think of life as a flight where we fly higher and higher. If I were a bird that needs feathers to fly higher, I would regard my mother as my strongest feather."
