- Aristotle

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.

- Elaine Heffner

Women do not have to sacrifice personhood if they are mothers. They do not have to sacrifice motherhood in order to be persons. Liberation was meant to expand women's opportunities, not to limit them. The self-esteem that has been found in new pursuits can also be found in mothering.

- Chinese proverb

One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade.

- Annie Sullivan

Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

So when the great word "Mother!" rang once more,
I saw at last its meaning and its place;
Not the blind passion of the brooding past,
But Mother -- the World's Mother -- come at last,
To love as she had never loved before --
To feed and guard and teach the human race.

- Virginia Woolf

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

- Nancy Friday

Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still.

- Nancy Friday

The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children.

- Jane Welsh Carlyle

Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother.

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Women know
The way to rear up children (to be just)
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes
And stringing pretty words that make no sense.

- Pearl S. Buck

I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.

- Margaret Sanger

A free race cannot be born of slave mothers.

- Ariel and Will Durant

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

- Florida Scott-Maxwel

No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.

- Elizabeth Kenny

My mother used to say, "He who angers you, conquers you!" But my mother was a saint.

- Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much.

- Golda Meir

At work, you think of the children you have left at home. At home, you think of the work you've left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself. Your heart is rent.

- Tenneva Jordan

A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.

- Amy Tan

Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.

- Maureen Hawkins

Before you were conceived I wanted you
Before you were born I loved you
Before you were here an hour I would die for you
This is the miracle of life.