Mother Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Thou camest out of thy mother's belly without government, thou hast liv'd hitherto without government, and thou mayst be carried to thy long home without government, when it shall please the Lord. How many people in this world live without government, yet do well enough, and are well look'd upon?

Miguel de Cervantes

Macduff was from his mother's womb Untimely ripp'd.

William Shakespeare

And, afterward, when a child was naughty or disobedient, its mother would say:
"You must pray to the good Santa Claus for forgiveness. He does not like naughty children, and, unless you repent, he will bring you no more pretty toys."
But Santa Claus himself would not have approved this speech. He brought toys to the children because they were little and helpless, and because he loved them. He knew that the best of children were sometimes naughty, and that the naughty ones were often good. It is the way with children, the world over, and he would not have changed their natures had he possessed the power to do so.

'Who will wonder that Barbara had a headache, or that Barbara's mother was disposed to be cross, or that she slightly underrated Astley's, and thought the clown was older than they had taken him to be last night? Kit was not surprised to hear her say so—not he. He had already had a misgiving that the inconstant actors in that dazzling vision had been doing the same thing the night before last, and would do it again that night, and the next, and for weeks and months to come, though he would not be there. Such is the difference between yesterday and today. We are all going to the play, or coming home from it.'

Charles Dickens

Tell mother that however dogs and samovars might behave themselves, winter comes after summer, old age after youth, and misfortune follows happiness (or the other way around). A person can not be healthy and cheerful throughout life. Losses lie waiting and man can not safeguard against death, even if he be Alexander of Macedonia. One must be prepared for anything and consider everything to be inevitably essential, as sad as that may be.

Nicias, do you think you can erase with good deeds the wrongs you committed against your mother? What good deed will ever reach her? Her soul is a scorching noon time, without a single breath of a breeze, nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing lives there; a great emaciated sun, an immobile sun eternally consumes her.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Say, what is the spell, when her fledgelings are cheeping,
That lures the bird home to her nest?
Or wakes the tired mother, whose infant is weeping,
To cuddle and croon it to rest?

I greatly doubt whether the men who become pirate chiefs are those who are filled with retrospective terror of their fathers, or whether Napoleon, at Austerlitz, really felt that he was getting even with Madame Mère. I know nothing of the mother of Attila, but I rather suspect that she spoilt the little darling, who subsequently found the world irritating because it sometimes resisted his whims.

Bertrand Russell

We have some of the most influential Members of Congress here today, and I do hope that we can get this appropriation for these day-care centers, which seems to me to be money very wisely spent, and also under consideration of the tax bill, that we can consider the needs of the working mothers, and both of these will be very helpful, and I would like to lobby in their behalf.

John F. Kennedy

It is now perfectly clear to me that, as the shape of his head and the growth of his hair indicate, he is descendant from the negroes who joined in the flight of Moses from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the father's side was crossed with a nigger). Now this union of Jewishness to Germanness on a negro basis was bound to produce an extraordinary hybrid. The importunity of the fellow is also niggerlike.

How are we to reconcile our supreme duty towards memory with the need to forget that is essential to life? No generation has had to confront this paradox with such urgency. The survivors wanted to communicate everything to the living: the victim's solitude and sorrow, the tears of mothers driven to madness, the prayers of the doomed beneath a fiery sky.

The goal of female education must invariably be the future mother.

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conquerer, that confidence of success that often induces real success.

For the existing world is not a dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as a dream; neither is it a disease; but it is the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn't put no dogs on me, they didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father.... Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.

Aren't these liberals, those reprobate defenders of individualism, ashamed to see the tears of the mothers and wives, or don't these cold-blooded accountants even notice? Have they already grown so inhuman that they are no longer capable of feeling? It is understandable why bolshevism simply removed such creatures. They were worthless to humanity, nothing but an encumbrance to their Volk. Even the bees get rid of the drones when they can no longer be of service to the hive. The Bolshevik procedures are thus quite natural.

In order to get meat, we have to kill. And we are certainly not entitled to any other milk except the mother's milk in our infancy.

'My father and mother were honest, though poor – '
'Skip all that!' cried the Bellman in haste.

'He used to wear a little blond moustache but Mother made him cut it off. She said -'
'Don't tell me. The minister needed it to stuff a cushion.'

Raymond Chandler

My mother would tell me that the shortest cut to purification after the unholy touch was to cancel the touch by touching any Mussalman passing by.

Nature — the Gentlest Mother is, Impatient of no Child — The feeblest — or the waywardest — Her Admonition mild —

Emily Dickinson

Niobe would have been called most blessed of mothers,
had she not seemed so herself.

I am sure that all people know deep down inside that the little child in the mother's womb is a human being from the moment of conception, created in the image of God to love and be loved. Let us pray that nobody will be afraid to protect that little child, to help that little child to be born. Jesus said: 'If you receive a little child in my name, you receive me.'

Leisure is the mother of philosophy; and commonwealth, the mother of peace and leisure.

Who are we, as we stand before the child Jesus? Who are we, standing as we stand before today's children? Are we like Mary and Joseph, who welcomed Jesus and cared for him with the love of a father and a mother? Or are we like Herod, who wanted to eliminate him? Are we like the shepherds, who went in haste to kneel before him in worship and offer him their humble gifts? Or are we indifferent?