Mother quotes
11.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Come mothers and fathers Throughout the land And don't criticize What you can't understand Your sons and your daughters Are beyond your command Your old road is Rapidly agin' Please get out of the new one If you can't lend your hand For the times they are a-changin'."
"The world you live in is 100 percent your own responsibility. If you don't like your world, it doesn't work to say, "Well, it's my mother's fault. She taught me how to think.""
"Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: 'Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.' That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday."
"I love my mother so much, because I see the whole of her."
"Every life and every childhood is filled with frustrations; we cannot imagine it otherwise, for even the best mother cannot satisfy all her child's wishes and needs. It is not the suffering caused by frustration, however, that leads to emotional illness, but rather the fact that the child is forbidden by the parents to experience and articulate this suffering, the pain felt at being wounded."
"Humanity cherishes its swaddling clothes; but it shall not grow up unless it can free itself from them. Turning down his mother's breast does not make the weaned child ungrateful. ... Rise up naked, valiant; make the sheaths crack; push aside the stakes; to grow straight you need no more than the thrust of your sap and the call of the sun."
"My mother's eyes were large and brown, like my son's, but unlike Sam's, they were always frantic, like a hummingbird who can't quite find the flower but keeps jabbing around."
"I don't know if my mother was a narcissist - or bi-polar or borderline. Those were words she tossed around over the years."
"Our mothers and grandmothers ... moving to music not yet written."
"I think mothers and daughters are meant to give birth to each other, over and over; that is why our challenges to each other are so fierce; that is why, when love and trust have not been too badly blemished or destroyed, the teaching and learning one from the other is so indelible and bittersweet. We daughters must risk losing the only love we instinctively feel we can't live without in order to be who we are, and I am convinced this sends a message to our mothers to break their own chains, though they may be anchored in prehistory and attached to their own great grandmothers' hearts."
"The forest is the first cathedral. I felt that from the time I was a child. I credit my mother with that. I used to think it came from her Native-American side. Whichever it was, she instinctively connected with nature, and taught me that. Church just could not hold my spirit."
"I've stepped more into my womanhood, I'm a mother now, I'm having a beautiful relationship as a wife and as a friend."
"I have my mother who is an Irish-Italian, and my father who is African, so I have the taste buds of an Italian and the spice of an African."
"This familiarity with a respected physician and my appreciation of his work, or the tragedy I experienced with the long, tormented agony and death of my mother might have influenced me in wanting to study medicine. It was not the case."
"Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires."
"Even though my mother had told me growing up that, 'If you win, nobody cares what color you are,' that wasn't necessarily true in the N.F.L."
"Victor Hugo said you can stop an invasion of armies, but you can never stop an invasion of ideas. There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. It wasn't until 1920, four years after my mother was born - and she's still alive and healthy - that women were given the right to vote. Now it's hard even to imagine that for the greater part of the history of our country fifty percent of the population was not allowed to vote."
"When I think about that kind of spirit, I think about my mother, who is standing here with me tonight. My mother is the embodiment of what it means to have a Texas spirit, because she wanted nothing more than for her children to have a better life than she had, to have an education beyond the ninth-grade education that she had, to live happier lives, more successful ones than she had been able to live. And you know what? She raised the daughter who ran for governor."
"The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies."
"Plenty and peace breed cowards; hardness ever of hardiness is mother."
