A mother’s happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.  ~Honoré de BalzacPIM

A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.  ~Washington IrvingPIM

The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men – from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.  ~Oliver Wendell HolmesCOE

Motherhood has a very humanizing effect.  Everything gets reduced to essentials.  ~Meryl StreepMAC

The precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face.  ~D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 1971RC

Mother’s love grows by giving.  ~Charles LambPIM

No one in the world can take the place of your mother.  Right or wrong, from her viewpoint you are always right.  She may scold you for little things, but never for the big ones.  ~Harry TrumanPIM

Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother.  A child is a child.  They get bigger, older, but grown?  What’s that suppose to mean?  In my heart it don’t mean a thing.  ~Toni Morrison, Beloved, 1987

Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother.  ~Oprah Winfrey

Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds.  Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers and sisters, aunts and cousins, comrades and friends – but only one mother in the whole world.  ~Kate Douglas WigginPIM

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.  ~William Makepeace ThackerayCOE

There’s nothing like a mama-hug.  ~Terri Guillemets

Mother’s love is peace.  It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.  ~Erich FrommPIM

A suburban mother’s role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.  ~Peter De VriesMAC; CUL; PIM

If you have a mom, there is nowhere you are likely to go where a prayer has not already been.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

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 JordanPIM

That best academy, a mother’s knee.  ~James Russell LowellPIM

Perhaps we are given a mom that we might take into death the memory of a lullaby.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands.  But a mother’s love endures through all.  ~Washington Irving

Don’t ever tell the mother of a newborn that her baby’s smile is just gas.  ~Jill WoodhullTPV,UWP, QE jill woodhull – Variants: The baby broke into a magnificent smile. And don’t you even dare tell me it’s gas.People who say that are just haters. Ye of little faith. Nicole Caccavo Kear, amomamok.blogspot.com/2012/05/lost-in-translation.html; Sort of like when they say a baby’s smile is just gas. A Mommy can tell the difference! Myree, babyfit.sparkpeople.com/archive_posts.asp?imBoard=162&imparent=6181273; I hate when people say that a baby’s smile is just gas. Nori, seaweed-girl.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.  ~James JoycePIM

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.
~William ShakespeareCOE

I remember my mother’s prayers and they have always followed me.  They have clung to me all my life.  ~Abraham LincolnPIM

Mother is a verb, not a noun.  ~Proverb

Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall; A mother’s secret hope outlives them all.  ~Oliver Wendell HolmesPIM

Mother love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible.  ~Marion C. Garretty, quoted in A Little Spoonful of Chicken Soup for the Mother’s Soul

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,
And kissing full sense into empty words.
~Elizabeth Barrett BrowningPIM

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

I cannot forget my mother.  Though not as sturdy as others, s[S]he is my bridge.  When I needed to get across, she steadied herself long enough for me to run across safely.  ~Renita WeemsPIM

A man’s work is from sun to sun, but a mother’s work is never done.  ~Author Unknown

Mother – that was the bank where we deposited all our hurts and worries.  ~T. DeWitt TalmageCOE; MAC

The desolation and terror of, for the first time, realizing that the mother can lose you, or you her, and your own abysmal loneliness and helplessness without her.  ~Francis ThompsonMAC

All mothers are working mothers.  ~Author Unknown

One of the very few reasons I had any respect for my mother when I was thirteen was because she would reach into the sink with her bare hands – bare hands – and pick up that lethal gunk and drop it into the garbage.  To top that, I saw her reach into the wet garbage bag and fish around in there looking for a lost teaspoon.  Bare hands – a kind of mad courage.  ~Robert FulghumPIM

My mother is a poem
I’ll never be able to write,
though everything I write
is a poem to my mother.
~Sharon DoubiagoPIM

The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated.  ~Washington IrvingPIM

If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?  ~Milton BerlePIM

Mother, the ribbons of your love are woven around my heart.  ~Author Unknown

A mom’s hug lasts long after she lets go.  ~Author Unknown

With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.  ~Isadora DuncanMAC

All women become like their mothers.  That is their tragedy.  No man does.  That’s his.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895

She never quite leaves her children at home, even when she doesn’t take them along.  ~Margaret Culkin BanningPIM

No painter’s brush, nor poet’s pen
In justice to her fame
Has ever reached half high enough
To write a mother’s name.
~Author UnknownPIM

It’s not easy being a mother.  If it were easy, fathers would do it.  ~From the television show The Golden GirlsFCN

There is an instinct in a woman to love most her own child – and an instinct to make any child who needs her love, her own.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

What are Raphael’s Madonnas but the shadow of a mother’s love, fixed in permanent outline forever?  ~Thomas Wentworth HigginsonCOE

Sweater, n.:  garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.  ~Ambrose Bierce

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born.  She never existed before.  The woman existed, but the mother, never.  A mother is something absolutely new.  ~RajneeshMAC; PIM

Every beetle is a gazelle in the eyes of its mother.  ~Moorish ProverbPIM