Mother Quotes: Celebrating the Love & Wisdom of Mothers

"Mother love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible"

Marion C. Garretty, Poet

"What a mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin"

Henry Ward Beecher, Clergyman

"Hope... is the companion of power, and the mother of success; for who so hopes has within him the gift of miracles"

Samuel Smiles, Author

"Children that are raised in a home with a married mother and father consistently do better in every measure of well-being than their peers who come from divorced or step-parent, single-parent, cohabiting homes"

Todd Tiahrt, Politician

"Diligence is the mother of good luck"

Benjamin Franklin, Politician

"A mother should give her children a superabundance of enthusiasm; that after they have lost all they are sure to lose on mixing with the world, enough may still remain to prompt fated support them through great actions"

Augustus Hare, Writer

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his"

Oscar Wilde, Dramatist

"The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization"

Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect

"There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep"

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Philosopher

"Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure"

Petrarch, Poet

"I have an almost religious zeal... not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up"

Dan Millman, Author

"My mother was a dominant force in my life. She had a very specific idea about education, which was: you should know everything about everything. It was quite simple. There was no exclusivity, and there really was no judgment"

Twyla Tharp, Dancer

"The mob is the mother of tyrants"

Diogenes, Philosopher

"Not so cold, some snow fell. I went inside the log cabin and said goodbye to Mother, she was so alike grandmother, just younger"

Anders Zorn, Artist

"I've played Henry Fonda's mother so often that, whenever we run into each other, I call him 'son' and he calls me 'Ma', just to save time"

Jane Darwell, Actress

"I owe a lot to my parents, especially by mother and my father"

Greg Norman, Athlete

"Diligence is the mother of good fortune"

Benjamin Disraeli, Statesman

"My mother is still battling alcoholism"

Patrick J. Kennedy, Politician

"Every girl should use what Mother Nature gave her before Father Time takes it away"

Laurence J. Peter, Writer

"Her death has had a huge effect on me. It felt like a big hole appeared on my left side - apparently your left side is your mother - which I thought could never be filled. Now I think what you have to do is fill it with yourself because your mother is part of you. I'm easing into that space, using it and being comforted by it"

Imelda Staunton, Actress

"I think the Mother is gradually revealing itself to me and taking over. But it is not the Mother alone. It is the Mother and the Father, the male and the female, sort of gradually having their marriage"

Bede Griffiths, Clergyman

"The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Tse-tung and Mother Theresa - not often coupled with each other, but the two people I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point which is 'you're going to make choices; you're going to challenge; you're going to say why not; you're going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before"

Anita Dunn, Public Servant

"I started out as a very young girl in Hollywood doing westerns portraying a mother with a couple of kids"

Dorothy Malone, Actress

"Fear is the mother of morality"

Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosopher

"Men are what their mothers made them"

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Philosopher

"Night is the mother of counsels"

George Herbert, Poet

"Nature, more of a stepmother than a mother in several ways, has sown a seed of evil in the hearts of mortals, especially in the more thoughtful men, which makes them dissatisfied with their own lot and envious of another s"

Desiderius Erasmus, Philosopher

"A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes"

Robert Frost, Poet

"No mother would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for economic advantage, for ideology"

Ronald Reagan, President

"Be able to confide your innermost secrets to your mother and your innermost fears to your father"

Marilyn vos Savant, Author

"The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent"

Erich Fromm, Psychologist

"Fear is the mother of foresight"

Thomas Hardy, Novelist

"Poverty may be the mother of crime, but lack of good sense is the father"

Jean de la Bruyere, Philosopher

"God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers"

Rudyard Kipling, Writer

"An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy"

Rudyard Kipling, Writer

"I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble"

Agatha Christie, Writer

"Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire"

Edna O'Brien, Novelist

"Girls are the future mothers of our society, and it is important that we focus on their well-being"

Miriam Makeba, Musician

"There was never a great man who had not a great mother"

Olive Schreiner, Writer

"It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life"

Augustus Hare, Writer

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