What is a Mother?

Mother, Mom, Mommy, Moms, Mum,
Mummy, Ma, Mam, Mammy, Maa, Amma,
Mata, Mama, Mamma, Eema, or eomma

Because of the complexity and differences
of a mothers' social, cultural, and
religious definitions and roles,
it is challenging to define a mother
to suit a universally accepted definition.

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

Being a full-time mother is

one of the highest salaried jobs in my field,

since the payment is pure love.

~Mildred B. Vermont

A suburban mother's role is to

deliver children obstetrically once,

and by car forever after.

~Peter De Vries

The phrase "working mother" is redundant.

~Jane Sellman

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.

~Rajneesh

If the whole world were put into one scale,

and my mother in the other,

the whole world would kick the beam.

~Lord Langdale (Henry Bickersteth)

I remember my mother's prayers

and they have always followed me.

They have clung to me all my life.

~Abraham Lincoln

Some mothers are kissing mothers

and some are scolding mothers,

but it is love just the same,

and most mothers kiss and scold together.

~Pearl S. Buck

A Freudian slip is when you say

one thing - but mean your mother.

~Author Unknown

Sweater, n.: garment worn by child

when its mother is feeling chilly.

~Ambrose Bierce

Women's Liberation is just a lot of foolishness.

It's the men who are discriminated against.

They can't bear children.

And no one's likely to do anything about that.

~Golda Meir

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 Holmes

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom

of which you will always find forgiveness.

~Honoré de Balzac

All women become like their mothers.

That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

~Oscar Wilde,

The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895

He is a poor son whose sonship does not

make him desire to serve all men's mothers.

~Harry Emerson Fosdick

Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime.

~William Shakespeare

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.

~Spanish Proverb

She never quite leaves her children at home,

even when she doesn't take them along.

~Margaret Culkin Banning

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,

Women and Beauty

If evolution really works,

how come mothers only have two hands?

~Milton Berle

Motherhood is priced Of God,

a price no man may dare to lessen or misunderstand.

~Helen Hunt Jackson

Mothers are fonder,

than fathers of their children,

because they are more certain they are their own.

~Aristotle

Women are aristocrats,

and it is always the mother who makes us

feel that we belong to the better sort.

~John Lancaster Spalding

Motherhood has a very humanizing effect.

Everything gets reduced to essentials.

~Meryl Streep

The sweetest sounds to mortals given

are heard in Mother, Home, and Heaven.

~William Goldsmith Brown

What are Raphael's Madonnas

but the shadow of a mother's love,

fixed in permanent outline forever?

~Thomas Wentworth Higginson

My mom is a neverending song in my heart

of comfort, happiness, and being.

I may sometimes forget the words

but I always remember the tune.

~Graycie Harmon

The formative period for building character

for eternity is in the nursery.

The mother is queen of that realm and sways

a scepter more potent than that of kings or priests.

~Author Unknown

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

I love my mother as the trees love water and sunshine

she helps me grow, prosper, and reach great heights.

~Adabella Radici

[A] mother is one to whom

you hurry when you are troubled.

~Emily Dickinson

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 Irving

Any mother could perform the jobs

of several air traffic controllers with ease.

~Lisa Alther

Now, as always, the most automated

appliance in a household is the mother.

~Beverly Jones

That best academy, a mother's knee.

~James Russell Lowell

A mother's arms are made of tenderness

and children sleep soundly in them.

~Victor Hugo

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

The only mothers,

it is safe to forget on Mother's Day,

are the good ones.

~Mignon McLaughlin,

The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Hundreds of dewdrops to greet the dawn,

Hundreds of bees in the purple clover,

Hundreds of butterflies on the lawn,

But only one mother the wide world over.

~George Cooper

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 Balzac

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

A mom forgives us all our faults,

not to mention one or two we don't even have.

~Robert Brault,

www.robertbrault.com

My mother is a poem

I'll never be able to write,

though everything I write

is a poem to my mother.

~Sharon Doubiago

With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.

~Isadora Duncan

One good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters.

~George Herbert

There's nothing like a mama-hug.

~Adabella Radici

Who fed me from her gentle breast

And hushed me in her arms to rest,

And on my cheek sweet kisses prest?

My Mother.

~Anne Taylor

Mother's love is peace.

It need not be acquired,

it need not be deserved.

~Erich Fromm

Who ran to help me when I fell,

And would some pretty story tell,

Or kiss the place to make it well?

My mother.

~Ann Taylor

Mother...

that was the bank where we deposited

all our hurts and worries.

~T. DeWitt Talmage

The precursor of the mirror is the mother's face.

~D.W. Winnicott,

Playing and Reality, 1971

Mother is the name for God

in the lips and hearts of little children.

~William Makepeace Thackeray

A daughter is a mother's gender partner,

her closest ally in the family confederacy,

an extension of her self.

And mothers are their daughters' role model,

their biological and emotional road map,

the arbiter of all their relationships.

~Victoria Secunda

Mother's love grows by giving.

~Charles Lamb

I miss thee, my Mother! Thy image is still

The deepest impressed on my heart.

~Eliza Cook

The tie which links mother and child

is of such pure and immaculate strength

as to be never violated.

~Washington Irving

I cannot forget my mother. She is my bridge.

When I needed to get across,

she steadied herself long enough for me to run across safely.

~Renita Weems

A little girl, asked where her home was,

replied, "where mother is."

~Keith L. Brooks

Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall;

A mother's secret hope outlives them all.

~Oliver Wendell Holmes

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 Wiggin

If I was damned of body and soul,

I know whose prayers would make me whole,

Mother o' mine, O mother o'mine.

~Rudyard Kipling

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking

dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.

~James Joyce

My mother had a slender, small body,

but a large heart - a heart so large

that everybody's joys found welcome in it,

and hospitable accommodation.

~Mark Twain

It's not easy being a mother.

If it were easy, fathers would do it.

~From the television show The Golden Girls

The mother's heart is the child's school-room.

~Henry Ward Beecher

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 Browning

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 Thompson

My mom is literally a part of me.

You can't say that about many people

except relatives, and organ donors.

~Carrie Latet

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

~Moorish Proverb

All that I am or ever hope to be,

I owe to my angel Mother.

~Abraham Lincoln

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 Unknown

Women who miscalculate are called mothers.

~Abigail Van Buren

A man's work is from sun to sun,

but a mother's work is never done.

~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 Fulghum

One lamp - thy mother's love - amid the stars

Shall lift its pure flame changeless, and before

The throne of God, burn through eternity -

Holy - as it was lit and lent thee here.

~Nathaniel Parker Willis

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 Truman

God could not be everywhere,

so he created mothers.

~Jewish Proverb

Life is the fruit she longs to hand you,

Ripe on a plate.

And while you live,

Relentlessly she understands you.

~Phyllis McGinley

All mothers are working mothers.

~Author Unknown

Because I feel that in the heavens above

The angels, whispering one to another,

Can find among their burning tears of love,

None so devotional as that of "Mother,"

Therefore,

by that dear name I have long called you,

You who are more than mother unto me.

~Edgar Allan Poe

The best conversations with mothers

always take place in silence,

when only the heart speaks.

~Carrie Latet

Biology -

is the least of what makes someone a mother.

~Oprah Winfrey

A man loves his sweetheart the most,

his wife the best,

but his mother the longest.

~Irish Proverb

It took me awhile to remember where I got these,

but I did and I want to give the 'Author' credit...

So please visit the site and enjoy!

It's been around since March 18, 1998...

That's just 7 days after Greg and I got married,

WOW! - Anyway, be sure to visit the site...

http://www.QuoteGarden.com

 A mother is someone to shelter and guide us,

To love us, whatever we do,

With a warm understanding and infinite patience

And wonderful gentleness, too.

How often a mother means swift reassurance

In soothing our small, childish fears,

How tenderly mothers watch over their children

And treasure them all through the years!

The heart of a mother is full of forgiveness

For any mistake, big or small,

And generous always in helping her family,

Whose needs she has placed above all.

A mother can utter a word of compassion

And make all our cares fall away,

She can brighten a home with the sound of her

laughter and make life delightful and happy.

A mother possesses incredible wisdom

And wonderful insight and skill

In each human heart is that one special corner

Which only a mother can fill!

By Katherine Nelson Davis

"M" is for the million things she gave me,

"O" means only that she's growing old,

"T" is for the tears she shed to save me,

"H" is for her heart of purest gold;

"E" is for her eyes, with love-light shining,

"R" means right, and right she'll always be,

Put them all together, they spell

"MOTHER,"

A word that means the world to me.

Howard Johnson (c. 1915)

May You Be Blessed With

A Very Loving Mother!