Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.

- Michael Levine

When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.

- Sophia Loren

To the highest leadership among women it is given to hold steadily in one hand the sacred vessels that hold the ancient sanctities of life, and in the other a flaming torch to light the way for oncoming generations.

- Anna Garlin Spencer

There never was a child so lovely, but his mother was glad to get him asleep.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as responsible as the work of a woman who is bringing up a family of small children; for upon her time and strength demands are made not only every hour of the day but often every hour of the night.

- Theodore Roosevelt

Certainly the mother serves the interests of patriarchy: she exemplifies in one person religion, social conscience, and nationalism. Institutional motherhood revives and renews all other institutions.

- Adrienne Rich

Mother's Day, it's beautiful thought, but it's somebody's hurtin' conscience that thought of the idea. It was someone who had neglected their mother for years, and then they figured out: I got to do something about Momma. And knowing Momma was that easy, they figured, "we'll give her a day, and it will be all right with Momma." Give her a day, and then in return Momma gives you the other 364. See?

- Will Rogers

All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is emerging is a world that tries to worship both virgins and mothers and in the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins.

- W. E. B. Du Bois

Women need real moments of solitude and self-reflection to balance out how much of ourselves we give away.

- Barbara De Angelis

One of the things my parents taught me, and I'll always be grateful for the gift, is to not ever let anybody else define me.

- Wilma Mankiller

A child too, can never grasp the fact that the same mother who cooks so well, is so concerned about his cough, and helps so kindly with his homework, in some circumstance has no more feeling than a wall of his hidden inner world.

- Alice Miller

Part of the reason [motherly advice] bugs us as daughters is because our mothers are so powerful in our lives. They loom like giants. The reason mothers keep at it is because they're so powerless. They cannot get you to do what is so obvious to them you should do.

- Deborah Tannen

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

- Marilyn French

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.

- Theodore Hesburgh

The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.

- Sam Levenson

The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant -- and let the air out of the tires.

- Dorothy Parker



And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see -- or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

- Alice Walker



She was the archetypal selfless mother: living only for her children, sheltering them from the consequences of their actions -- and in the end doing them irreparable harm.

- Marcia Muller



Bitter are the tears of a child: Sweeten them.
Deep are the thoughts of a child: Quiet them.
Sharp is the grief of a child: Take it from him.
Soft is the heart of a child: Do not harden it.

- Pamela Glenconner



Life is nothing but a series of crosses for us mothers.

- Colette



The most effective form of birth control I know is spending the day with my kids.

- Jill Bensley



When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race.

- Margaret Sanger



With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

Braided Lives

- Marge Piercy



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.

- Maureen Hawkins



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

The Kitchen God's Wife

- Amy Tan



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.

- Tenneva Jordan



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.

- Golda Meir



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

- Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis



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

- Elizabeth Kenny



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

- Florida Scott-Maxwell



The family is the nucleus of civilization.

- Ariel and Will Durant



A free race cannot be born of slave mothers.

- Margaret Sanger



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.

- Pearl S. Buck



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.

Aurora Leigh

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning



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

- Jane Welsh Carlyle



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.

- Nancy Friday



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

- Nancy Friday



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.

- Virginia Woolf



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.

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman



Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.

- Anne Sullivan



One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade.

- Chinese proverb



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.

- Elaine Heffner



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

- Aristotle