Selected motherhood quotes

1. Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

2. I'm very, very blessed. But my safety, my privacy, and my respect are three things that I feel like are trying to be taken away from me right now. As a mother I have to speak up and say something. I have to speak up.

3. Oh, I've wept. Yeah, I've definitely wept just with the world, you know, how judgmental they are. You know what, I know I'm a good mom.

4. Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head.

5. I believe in the Motherhood of God.

6. With all the efforts made by modern society to nurture and educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world!

7. Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.

8. I believe in one secret and ineffable LORD; and in one Star in the Company of Stars of whose fire we are created, and to which we shall return; and in one Father of Life, Mystery of Mystery, in His name CHAOS, the sole viceregent of the Sun upon the Earth; and in one Air the nourisher of all that breathes. And I believe in one Earth, the Mother of us all, and in one Womb wherein all men are begotten, and wherein they shall rest, Mystery of Mystery, in Her name BABALON.

9. The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive woman can succeed in being a 'loving' mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving woman, the woman who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation.

10. So, thank you for reminding me about the importance of being a good mom and a great volunteer as well.

11. Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked; as I never was when I was not one.

12. I helped deliver one of my best friend's children ... I just was so amazed by my friend, because she was not just a woman, she was not just a mother. At that moment she was creation; she was life; she was God. And as I looked in her eyes, BOOM, her pussy exploded.

13. Maids must be wives and mothers to fulfil The entire and holiest end of woman's being.

14. No artist's masterpiece can match a mother's creation of a successful child, one who has been freed to explore and to grow. ... Success is measured not only by who we are, but by what gifts we give. ... Ah, the mother whose gift to the world is a person!

15. Woman must have her freedom; the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she shall be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers; and before it can be his, it is hers alone. [npg] She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it. That right to decide imposes upon her the duty of clearing the way to knowledge by which she may make and carry out the decision. [npg] Birth control is woman's problem. The quicker she accepts it as hers and hers alone, the quicker will society respect motherhood. The quicker, too, will the world be made a fit place for her children to live.

16. I thought: if I could just make a good family, if I could just learn to be to a mother to the children, their whole lives, what [he] was, coming so late into ours, then that would mean more in the long run, it would be a finer accomplishment than anything I could ever do with my mind or my hands.

17. It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.

18. She gave me eyes, she gave me ears; And humble cares,and delicate fears; A heart, the fountain of sweet tears; And love, and thought, and joy.

19. The promise had not failed her. . . . She had won everything from life, for she had given the world a master. Words seemed to speak themselves in her ear . . . 'Bethink you of the blessedness. Every wife is like the Mother of God and has the hope of bearing a saviour of mankind.'

20. Thou, while thy babes around thee cling, Shalt show us how divine a thing A Woman may be made.

21. Marie Farrar: month of birth, April Died in the Meissen penitentiary An unwed mother, judged by the law, she will Show you how all that lives, lives frailly. You who bear your sons in laundered linen sheets And call your pregnancies a 'blessed' state Should never damn the outcast and the weak: Her sin was heavy, but her suffering great. Therefore, I beg, make not your anger manifest For all that lives needs help from all the rest.

22. Who is Gloria Estefan today? I'm very fulfilled as a woman. I've been able to have a wonderful family life, a fantastic career. I have a lot of good friends around me. My family has been my grounding point, and rooted me deeply to the earth. . . I'm very happy. I've done everything I ever wanted to do. The key to me was -- I told my husband when we were in our 20s -- I'm going to work really hard, so one day I won't have to work so hard. And to me what that was, was having choices. And I do have choices now -- and I have take full advantage of that. It's important for me now to be here for my little girl [Emily, age 12]. My son is full grown -- and I know have quickly that goes. So, I'm balancing being a mother -- which to me is the most important role I have on this earth -- and still being creative, writing -- which is what I love to do. So, I've been able to branch out into not just writing songs like you have heard through the years -- but writing children's books, writing a screenplay. But at my core that's what I am: a writer. And that's what I enjoy doing behind the scenes: writing the songs for albums, recording it. And that's why you have seen me take more of a back seat to being the center of attention, and being out on tour and doing that kind of thing. I've stepped up a lot of my charity work. This year, the five concerts I did were all for charity: different ones and my own foundation. So, that's becoming a bigger and bigger part of my life -- as I wanted it to be. And [I keep] just growing and evolving.

23. [Charity] conceals a stupid cruelty, because it is not courageous enough to face unpleasant facts. Aside from the question of the unfitness of many women to become mothers, aside from the very definite deterioration in the human stock that such programs would inevitably hasten, we may question its value even to the normal though unfortunate mother. For it is never the intention of such philanthropy to give the poor over-burdened and often undernourished mother of the slum the opportunity to make the choice herself, to decide whether she wishes time after time to bring children into the world. It merely says 'Increase and multiply: We are prepared to help you do this.' Whereas the great majority of mothers realize the grave responsibility they face in keeping alive and rearing the children they have already brought into the world, the maternity center would teach them how to have more. The poor woman is taught how to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid bringing into the world her eighth. ...Such philanthropy, as Dean Inge has so unanswerably pointed out, is kind only to be cruel, and unwittingly promotes precisely the results most deprecated. It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.

24. Mother or Murderer, you have given or taken life - Now all is one!

25. Upon the gallows hung a wretch, Too sullied for the hell To which the law entitled him. As nature's curtain fell The one who bore him tottered in, - For this was woman's son. ''Twere all I had,' she stricken gasped - Oh, what a livid boon!

26. Young women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it's only when you have children that you realise you're not a nice person at all, but generally a selfish bully.

27. The sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

28. I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children. I have contracted. I have eased My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized Your luck And your lives from your unfinished reach, If I stole your births and your names, Your straight baby tears and your games, Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths, If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

29. Sometimes I became so melancholic that I felt all actresses should be spayed so they couldn't have children. It's so very difficult to balance the careers of motherhood and the theater.

30. L'amour est le plus joli larcin que la Societe ait su faire a la Nature; mais la maternite, n'est-ce pas la Nature dans sa joie? Un sourire a seche mes larmes.

31. Le hasard, ma chere, est le dieu de la maternite.

32. La joie d'une mere est une lumiere qui jaillit jusque sur l'avenir et le lui eclaire, mais qui se reflete sur le passe pour lui donner le charme des souvenirs.

33. Ah! combien de choses un enfant apprend a sa mere. Il y a tant de promesses faites entre nous et la vertu dans cette protection incessante due a un etre faible, que la femme n'est dans sa veritable sphere que quand elle est mere; elle deploie alors seulement ses forces, elle pratique les devoirs de sa vie, elle en a tous les bonheurs et tous les plaisirs.

34. La maternite comporte une suite de poesies douces ou terribles. Pas une heure qui n'ait ses joies et ses craintes.

35. Une vraie mere n'est pas libre.

36. La science de la mere comporte des merites silencieux, ignores de tous, sans parade, une vertu en detail, un devouement de toutes les heures.

37. L'amour est profondement egoiste, tandis que la maternite tend a multiplier nos sentiments.

38. They came three thousand miles, and died, To keep the Past upon its throne; Unheard, beyond the ocean tide, Their English mother made her moan.

39. Every wife is like Mary the Blessed and may bear a saviour of mankind. The road is long, but the ways of Heaven are sure.

40. Mother stands for comfort. Mother will hide the murderer. Mother hides the madman. Mother will stay mum.

41. Compulsory motherhood is not ennobling, although the friends of the foetus are at pains to point out that most women denied abortions end up loving their issue just the same. Whether they love them just the same as they would have if they had wanted them is of course unverifiable; most women are not so perverse and unjust as to punish their children for the crimes of society (their fathers), but the oppression of their circumstances is real notwithstanding. For the oppressors themselves to take credit for the women's magnanimity is sickeningly smug. The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.

42. In a sane society no woman would be left to struggle on her own with the huge transformation that is motherhood, when a single individual finds herself joined by an invisible umbilical cord to another person from whom she will never be separated, even by death.

43. What a mother sings to the cradle goes all the way to the coffin.

44. Wise children always choose a mother who was a shocking flirt in her maiden days, and so had several offers before she accepted their fortunate papa.

45. Where yet was ever found a mother Who'd give her booby for another?

46. Cold on Canadian hills or Minden's plain, Perhaps that parent mourned her soldier slain; Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, The big drops mingling with the milk he drew Gave the sad presage of his future years,- The child of misery, baptized in tears.

47. Being a housewife and a mother is the biggest job in the world, but if it doesn't interest you, don't do it - I would have made a terrible mother.

48. Of all the rights of women, the greatest is to be a mother.

49. Don't call me an icon. I'm only a mother trying to help.

50. Nursing does not diminish the beauty of a woman's breasts; it enhances their charm by making them look lived in and happy.

51. Womanliness means only motherhood; All love begins and ends there.

52. To me, the tenderest word in our language, the most pathetic fact within our knowledge, is maternity. Around this sacred word cluster the joys and sorrows, the agonies and ecstasies, of the human race. The mother walks in the shadow of death that she may give another life. Upon the altar of love she puts her own life in pawn. When the world is civilized, no wife will become a mother against her will. Man will then know that to enslave another is to imprison himself.