Quotes about mother
page 12

“Every male copulating with a woman returns to his origins in the womb. Goethe postponed intercourse until he was forty. This must be related to his self-imposed distance from his forceful mother. To refuse phallic penetration is to refuse surrender to the female matrix.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 257

“Peace of mind is very essential in anything that you do--particularly in music. But in my case, it was just the opposite. What new things could I learn when I was constantly disturbed and unhappy? And I tell you, this whole concept of getting lost in music and forgetting the world around you, is a myth. In my case, I can openly say that my troubles and problems were not forgotten by just holding the tanpura in my hand. When I would sit down for riyaz, I would, on the contrary, break down and cry over the daily scene. Over the question of just surviving through the next day. And it wasn't for me that I was worried, but for the entire family that I supported. I personally never thought of becoming rich, of having a new car or house. Those ambitions never entered my mind. All I knew then was the money was not enough. There were many humiliations I had to face because of this. A certain lady musician in Pune invited me over to her house one day. Her mother asked how much I charged for a concert. I told her Rs 125. She suggested that I move over to Pune and accept all her daughter's rejected programmes. They knew I was very badly off. I was insulted by this suggestion and left their house immediately. But later I thought that maybe they were trying to be helpful.”

Gangubai Hangal (1913–2009) Indian singer

In "On Gangubai Hangal by Sabina Sehgal Computer Science & Engineering - University of Washington".

Money, World, Family, Peace

“Kunti did not know his [Karna's] fate till years later, when she was not in a position to acknowledge him as her son. The son, on his part, never forgave the mother for having abandoned him. From the minute of his birth to well after his death this child was a constant source of dread and sorrow to the mother.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Source: The End Of An Epoch, p. 30.

Death, Fate, Birth, Parting

“A mother’s life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

La maternité comporte une suite de poésies douces ou terribles. Pas une heure qui n’ait ses joies et ses craintes.
Part I, ch. XLV.
Letters of Two Brides (1841-1842)

Life, Fear, Success, Joy

“The revolution comes when two strangers smile at each other, when a father refuses to send his child to school because schools destroy children, when a commune is started and people begin to trust each other, when a young man refuses to go to war and when a girl pushes aside all that her mother has 'taught' her and accepts her boyfriends (sic) love.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

"The Revolution Is Life Versus Death" https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2157415-sanders-revolution.html, in Vermont Freeman (1969), as quoted in "The origins of Sanders' ideology, in his own words" http://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/29/politics/bernie-sanders-own-words/ by Brianna Keilar, CNN (29 February 2016) 1970s

Love, War, Children, People

“Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book Lavinia

Source: Lavinia (2008), p. 184

Life, Women, Men, Truth

“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. As the old chief said, "The gift is not complete until it is given again."”

Gerry Spence (1929) American lawyer

Ah, the mother whose gift to the world is a person!
Source: Give Me Liberty! (1998), Ch. 17 : Success Redefined, p. 194

World, Success, Personality

“There are a lot of ways to mispronounce my name. That is the least common […] I checked with my mother. In 50 years no one's ever called her "Elsie Fag."”

Barney Frank (1940) American politician, former member of the House of Representatives for Massachusetts

Responding to Dick Armey's referring to him as "Barney Fag", unidentified publication/date
Quoted in [Solomon, John, 1 November 1998, http://www.sollyonline.com/content.cfm?copy=article&header=portfolio&portfolio=yes&SID=27, "America's Funniest Politicians", George, Solly Online, 2008-03-05]

Way

“Thomas watched him for a few minutes. Pop was good-looking, muscular, and his hair was almost gold even though it was getting a little thin on top. Thomas must have taken after his mother, whoever she was.”

Patricia Reilly Giff (1935) American children's writer

Source: Water Street (2006), Chapters 1-10, p. 13

“See mother earth her offspring's fate bemoan, And nations gaze at scenes before unknown! See the bright beams of heaven's revolving light Involved in sorrows and the veil of night! The goddess comes, she moves divinely fair”

Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) American poet

1770s, To His Excellency, George Washington (1775)

Fate, Light, Night

“I have no idea what forms this Paganism will have in another 30 years, I think we will be surprised. The Gods will manifest more and more--it's a matter of survival for the Earth, our Mother. That we Pagans are ever more numerous to worry over Her future is surely a sign of the Gods who act through us.”

Christopher Gérard (1962)

Pagan Power in Modern Europe (1999)

God, Idea, Thinking, Future

“…there is the fact that having a child transforms the basic marriage relationship. No longer are you simply husband and wife, you are mother and father as well, and all spontaneity vanishes immediately.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Wilson Lewis, Chapter 2, p. 35-36
2000s, The Wedding (2003)

Marriage

“Why do grandparents and grandchildren get along so well? They have the same enemy—the mother.”

Claudette Colbert (1903–1996) French-American actress

Time (September 14, 1981)

“Suppose, deep down, you suspect that you are dull, and your public works are a form of vengeance. You talk a good poem, and think by numbers. Once upon a time, you were interesting; then Mother died and you had to give it up.”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

"The Power Party" (p. 62)
Private Lives in the Imperial City (1979)

Thinking, Time

“Philosophy is like a mother who gave birth to and endowed all the other sciences. Therefore, one should not scorn her in her nakedness and poverty, but should hope, rather, that part of her Don Quixote ideal will live on in her children so that they do not sink into philistinism.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

(28 September 1932), p. 106
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)

Children, Hope, Birth, Science

“I grew up in a Hindu household but went to a Roman Catholic school. I grew up with a mother who said, 'I'll arrange a marriage for you at 18,' but she also said that we could achieve anything we put our minds to and encourage us to dream of becoming prime minister or president.”

Indra Nooyi (1955) Indian-born, naturalized American, business executive

Top 15 quotes from PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi

Marriage, School, Dreams

“I saw it," said James. "I saw it when he made the sparrows out of clay on the Sabbath. The teacher told him he shouldn’t do such things on the Sabbath. Jesus looked at the birds and they turned into real birds. They flew away. You saw it too. He killed Eleazer, Mother, I saw it.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Christ The Lord: Out Of Egypt (2005)

Bird, Teachers

“We all felt happy and excited because it was Diwali. My mother had saved lot of small coins from her shopping and gave them to me to buy crackers Stuffed full with sweets and feeling that life was grand I ran towards the market. Then I saw a blind beggar. He sat in the hot sun by the edge of the unpaved road while gusts of wind raised clouds of dust and rubbish over him. ‘Andhalalya paisa dey, Bhagwan’, he kept on saying to the passers, ‘Give one paisa to this blind man, oh! Bhagwan.’ In front of him there was a rusty cigarette tin. It struck me alongside my bright happy world there was a world of misery and pain.”

Baba Amte (1914–2008) Indian freedom fighter, social worker

Baba Amte: A Vision of New India

Life, Pain, Happiness, World

“No woman in the world, certainly none in America, has had to battle for her virtue, for her self-respect, for her right to her own children, as has the black mother.”

Richard R. Wright Jr. (1878–1967)

Wright Jr. 87 Years Behind the Black Curtain: An Autobiography. 1965

Children, World

“The second thing you need to know is the importance of Mohammed the prophet. His behaviour is an example to all Muslims and cannot be criticized. Now, if Mohammed had been a man of peace, let us say like Ghandi and Mother Theresa wrapped in one, there would be no problem. But Mohammed was a warlord, a mass murderer, a pedophile, and had several marriages – at the same time. Islamic tradition tells us how he fought in battles, how he had his enemies murdered and even had prisoners of war executed. Mohammed himself slaughtered the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

2000s, Speech at the Four Seasons, New York (25 September 2008)

Marriage, War, Peace, Problem

“After settling the affairs of Ajmir, the conqueror marched "towards Dehli (may God preserve its prosperity and perpetuate its splendour!) which is among the chief (mother) cities of Hind. When he arrived at Dehli, he saw " a fortress which in height and strength had not its equal nor second throughout the length and breadth of the seven climes." The army encamped around the fort. " A torrent of blood flowed on the field of battle, and it became evident to the chiefs that if they did not seek for safety from the sword of the king of the earth, and if they should deliver into the hands of Satan the time of option and the reins of good counsel, the condition of Dehli would be like that of Ajmir; so from the dread of kingly punishment, the Rai and mukaddams of that country placed their heads upon the line of slavery, and their feet within the circle of obedience, and made firm the conditions of tribute [mdlguzdrt) and the usages of service.”

Hasan Nizami Persian language poet and historian

About the conquest of Delhi. Hasan Nizami. Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 216. Also quoted in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.

God, Time, Country

“Now that all the distractions of the material life had been removed, Macrina persuaded her mother to give up her ordinary life and all showy style of living and the services of domestics to which she had been accustomed before, and bring her point of view down to that of the masses, and to share the life of the maids, treating all her slave girls as if they were sisters and belonged to the same rank as herself.”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

Life of Macrina

Life, Girl, Sister

“I want to combine the NAACP with Mothers Against Drunk Driving. It's called Mothers Against the Advancement of Colored People.”

Zach Galifianakis (1969) American actor and comedian

Live at the Purple Onion (2007)

People, Color

“When John Ryder, for instance, writes "I utter valediction to the author of my being," he means simply that he said goodbye to his mother.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

How to Be a Collector (1995).

“We resist hegemonic dominance of feminist thought by insisting that it is a theory in the making, that we must necessarily criticize, question, re-examine, and explore new possibilities. My persistent critique has been informed by my status as a member of an oppressed group, experience of sexist exploitation and discrimination, and the sense that prevailing feminist analysis has not been the force shaping my feminist consciousness. This is true for many women. There are white women who had never considered resisting male dominance until the feminist movement created an awareness that they could and should. My awareness of feminist struggle was stimulated by social circumstance. Growing up in a Southern, black, father-dominated, working class household, I experienced (as did my mother, my sisters, and my brother) varying degrees of patriarchal tyranny and it made me angry-it made us all angry. Anger led me to question the politics of male dominance and enabled me to resist sexist socialization. Frequently, white feminists act as if black women did not know sexist oppression existed until they voiced feminist sentiment. They believe they are providing black women with "the" analysis and "the" program for liberation. They do not understand, cannot even imagine, that black women, as well as other groups of women who live daily in oppressive situations, often acquire an awareness of patriarchal politics from their lived experience, just as they develop strategies of resistance (even though they may not resist on a sustained or organized basis). These black women observed white feminist focus on male tyranny and women's oppression as if it were a "new" revelation and felt such a focus had little impact on their lives. To them it was just another indication of the privileged living conditions of middle and upper class white women that they would need a theory to inform them that they were "oppressed." The implication being that people who are truly oppressed know it even though they may not be engaged in organized resistance or are unable to articulate in written form the nature of their oppression. These black women saw nothing liberatory in party line analyses of women's oppression. Neither the fact that black women have not organized collectively in huge numbers around the issues of "feminism" (many of us do not know or use the term) nor the fact that we have not had access to the machinery of power that would allow us to share our analyses or theories about gender with the American public negate its presence in our lives or place us in a position of dependency in relationship to those white and non-white feminists who address a larger audience.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, p. 10.

Women, People, Imagination, Understanding

“My mother was convinced, and on this head I have retained her firm belief, that to kill animals for the purpose of feeding on their flesh is one of the most deplorable and shameful infirmities of the human state; that it is one of those curses cast upon man either by his fall, or by the obduracy of his own perversity. She believed, and I am of the same belief, that these habits of hard-heartedness towards the gentlest animals, our companions, our auxiliaries, our brethren in toil and even in affection here below; that these immolations, these sanguinary appetites, this sight of palpitating flesh, are calculated to brutalize the instincts of the heart and make them ferocious. She believed, and I am of the same belief, that this nurture, which is seemingly much more succulent and much more energetic, contains in itself active causes of irritation and putridity, which sour the blood and shorten the days of mankind. In support of these ideas of abstinence, she quoted the innumerable gentle and pious tribes of India who deny themselves all that has had life; and the strong and healthy races of the shepherds and even of the laboring classes of our fields.”

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) French writer, poet, and politician

Book IV, Note VIII, p. 60
Les confidences (1849)

Life, Quotes, Idea, Support

“How many powerful memories are triggered by smell and taste? Your mother’s old perfume, the smell your father’s breath, the taste of the soap they’d make you eat.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Memory

“All of my decisions I made when I was a kid were decisions, would my mother and father be proud of.”

Ken Venturi (1931–2013) Professional golfer

Interview Ken Venturi http://www.asapsports.com/show_interview.php?id=5285, Kemper Insurance Open, Potomac, Maryland. ASAP Sports - Golf, June 3, 2000.

Decision

“All dharmas hide inside the mother's heart. To receive is dhamra.”

Laxmi Prasad Devkota (1909–1959) Nepali poet

आमाको दिल

Heart

“As a rule, each entity is born so that he experiences at least three roles, that of mother, father and child... Beside the three necessary roles there is another quality, different in dimension, which is also necessary for the personality, and this involves the fullest use of potential.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 163
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 4

Personality

“Three years ago, I came to you as a bride. Today, I come as a widow who, with a small child, was thrown out of her mother-in-law's house.”

Maneka Gandhi (1956) Indian politician and activist

During an election campaign speech in Amethi, as quoted in Mrs. "Gandhi's feisty daughter-in-law: more than a political nuisance?" http://www.csmonitor.com/1983/0406/040644.html, The Christian Science Monitor (6 April 1983) 1981-1990

Law, Housing

“You have to understand that I'm not the girl I used to be. I'm a wife and a mother now, and like everyone else I'm not perfect. I struggle with the choices I've made and I make mistakes, and half the time I wonder who I really am or what I'm doing or whether my life means anything at all. I'm not special at all, Dawson, and you need to know that. You have to understand that I'm just…ordinary.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Amanda Collier Ridley, Chapter 11, p. 171
2009, The Best of Me (2011)

Life, Girl, Understanding, Time

“I was a Yorkshire miner's son, the youngest of seven, and my mother was no longer so very young. She suffered from bad rheumatism in the back and would often say to me in winter, when I came home from school: 'Henry, boy, come and rub my back.' Then I would massage her back with liniment. When I came to model this figure [for his sculpture 'Seated Woman', 1957] which represents a fully mature woman, I found that I was unconsciously giving to its back the long-forgotten shape of the one that I had so often rubbed as a boy. Not just her shoulder but her whole back down from the shoulder blades with the skin close to the bone, to the fleshy lower parts. I had a strong sense of contrast between bone and flesh. I was seven or eight at the time [c. 1906].”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote of Moore, 1978; as cited in Henry Moore writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, California 2002, pp. 32-33
1970 and later

School, Home, Boy, Sense

“My picture [A Boat Passing a Lock, 1823-6] is liked at the [Royal] Academy, indeed it forms a decided feature and its light can not be put out. Because it is the light of nature — the Mother of all that is valuable in poetry — painting or anything else… my execution annoys most of them and all the scholastic ones – perhaps the scarifies I make for 'lightness' and 'brightness' is too much but these things are the essence of Landscape.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Letter to Rev. John Fisher, 1824, as quoted in Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Constable (Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1993), p. 288
1820s

Nature, Light, Painting

“I am lonely without measure; that is to say, I am alone with my doubles, phantasms in whom I realize specific dreams, ideas, inclinations, and so on. I rip three other people out of my inner life, give them names, and believe in them myself. Gradually three clearly defined types have emerged: *1: Grosz. *2: Count Ehrenfried, the nonchalant aristocrat with the well-manicured fingernails, concerned only with cultivating himself; in a word, the detached, aristocratic individualist. *3: The physician. Dr. William King Thomas, the more American, practical counterweight to Grosz the mother figure.”

George Grosz (1893–1959) German artist

Letter, September 1915, to Robert Bell; in Grosz, Briefe, p. 30 ff; as cited in 'Portfolios', Alexander Dückers; in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings - Essays Vol 1.; published by Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California & Prestel-Verlag, Germany, 1986, p. 112 - note 61

Life, People, Dreams, Idea

“Where is my daddy? asked the emerald. My da?
Moll dropped a glass, which shattered.
Your father.
Yes, said the emerald, amn’t I supposed to have one?
He’s not here.
Noticed that, said the emerald.
I’m never sure what you know and what you don’t know.
I ask in true perplexity.
He was Deus Lunus. The moon god. Sometimes thought of as the man in the moon.
Bosh! said the emerald. I don’t believe it.
Do you believe I’m your mother?
I do.
Do you believe you’re an emerald?
I am an emerald.
Used to be, said Moll, women wouldn’t drink from a glass into which the moon had shone. For fear of getting knocked up.
Surely this is a superstition?
Hoo, hoo, said Moll. I like superstition.
I thought the moon was female.
Don’t be culture-bound. It’s been female in some cultures at some times, and in others, not.
What did it feel like? The experience.
Not a proper subject for discussion with a child.
The emerald sulking. Green looks here and there.
Well it wasn’t the worst. Wasn’t the worst. I had an orgasm that lasted three hours. I judge that not the worst.”

Donald Barthelme book Sixty Stories

“The Emerald”.
Sixty Stories (1981)

Women, God, Fear, Feeling

“My mother, as much as I can remember from my early boyhood, and from what I heard of her after her death, was of a most lively temper, and possessed of a good and noble heart, but a little inclined to sensibility; her greatest pleasure was to see everyone happy about her. She loved me dearly and spoilt me. I adored her. Alas, I lost her when only a little boy, and never shall I efface from my memory the day of her death and funeral.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

My Life and Confessions, for Philippine, 1786

Love, Death, Happiness, Pleasure

“. In the beginning I was struggling very much with [painting] children, for that painting by Br. [probably, Henk Bremmer? ]. It has an almost square format. The woman must look to the right [and] there must be a child with her... But I painted only a few children with mothers, and recent times not at all; and then that size (square), I don't know how to handle it. I now think to come back to The Hague Sunday afternoon [and] to leave Heeze early. Monday here is another holy Day [catholic region]. So I can not work then..”

Suze Robertson (1855–1922) Dutch painter

translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
(version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Suze Robertson's brief:) .Ik heb hier in het begin nog al erg getobd met kinderen, voor dat schilderijtje van Br. [waarschijnlijk, nl:Henk Bremmer?]. Het formaat dat bijna vierkant is. De vrouw moet naar rechts kijken [en] er moet een kind bij.. .Maar kinderen bij moeders heb ik weinig geschilderd tenminste in de laatste tijd heelemaal niet en dan kan ik met dat formaat (vierkant) niet goed klaarkomen. Ik denk nu haast Zondagmiddag in den Haag te komen vroeg hier uit nl:Heeze te gaan. Maandag is hier weer heilige Dag [katholieke bevolking]. Dus kan ik ook niet werken..
In a letter of Suze Robertson from Heeze, 11 August 1904, to her husband Richard Bisschop in The Hague; as cited in Suze Robertson 1855-1922 – Schilderes van het harde en zware leven, exhibition catalog, ed. Peter Thoben; Museum Kemperland, Eindhoven, 2008, p. 11
1900 - 1922

Children, Thinking, Time, Painting

“So, can demonic spirits attach themselves to inanimate objects? The answer is yes. But I don't think every sweater you get from Goodwill has demons in it. But, in a sense, you're mother's just being super cautious, so hey, it isn't going to hurt you to rebuke any spirits that happen to have attached themselves to those clothes.”

Pat Robertson (1930) American media mogul, executive chairman, and a former Southern Baptist minister

2013-02-25
Pat Robertson
The 700 Club
Television, quoted in * 2013-02-28
Colbert Report Consumer Alert - Demonic Goodwill Items
The Colbert Report
Television
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/424278/february-28-2013/colbert-report-consumer-alert---demonic-goodwill-items
Responding to letter asking "I buy a lot of clothes and other items at Goodwill and other second-hand shops. Recently my mom told me that I need to pray over the items, bind familiar spirits, and bless the items before I bring them into the house. Is my mother correct? Can demons attach themselves to material items?"

Thinking, Sense, Hurt, Clothes

“The first duty of a government is to be true to itself. This does not mean perfection, it means a plan to strive for perfection. It means loyalty to ideals. The ideals of America were set out in the Declaration of Independence and adopted in the Constitution. They did not represent perfection at hand, but perfection found. The fundamental principle was freedom. The fathers knew that this was not yet apprehended. They formed a government firm in the faith that it was ever to press toward this high mark. In selfishness, in greed, in lust for gain, it turned aside. Enslaving others, it became itself enslaved. Bondage in one part consumed freedom in all parts. The government of the fathers, ceasing to be true to itself, was perishing. Five score and ten years ago, that divine providence which infinite repetition has made only the more a miracle, sent into the world a new life destined to save a nation. No star, no sign foretold his coming. About his cradle all was poor and mean, save only the source of all great men, the love of a wonderful woman. When she faded away in his tender years from her deathbed in humble poverty, she endowed her son with greatness. There can be no proper observance of a birthday which forgets the mother. Into his origin, as into his life, men long have looked and wondered. In wisdom great, but in humility greater, in justice strong, but in compassion stronger, he became a leader of men by being a follower of the truth. He overcame evil with good. His presence filled the nation. He broke the might of oppression. He restored a race to its birthright.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Duty of Government (1920)

Love, Life, Wisdom, Men

“Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.”

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

The Psychological Sell (p. 104)
The Female Eunuch (1970)

“A happy childhood means - or ought to mean - that one's first experience of the world is a true experience - not yet comprehensive, of course, yet comprehending the prime reality, so that it becomes an experience of an essential order which thenceforward will serve as a basis of comparison, in whose light all future falsification, all disorder, will be recognised as wrong and invalid. A happy childhood means above all a loved child. Because Thérèse was a happy child, her beginnings could contain perfection. Because she was a loved child, she received from the beginning the knowledge that others must struggle towards so consciously, with such difficulty, by painfully strenuous detours: the simple truth that to so many of us seems the most incredible and amazing lesson of religion: that we can be loved without having deserved it: that grace comes first.. It is bliss simply to be someone's child, a child of a father, of a mother, living, moving and having its being in a love which is unmerited, unmeritable, anticipatory, unconditional and immutable. On this basic mystery and reality Thérèse's childhood was built. This was the source of her subsequent doctrine of the way of spiritual childhood.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

The Hidden Face p. 48-49.

Love, Happiness, Truth, World

“I could best believe that love was some sort of rubbish thought up by the romantic geniuses who were now going to start bellowing like cows, or even dying; at least, there is no mention of love in Njal's Saga, which is nevertheless better than any romantic literature. I had lived for twenty years with the best people in the country, my father and mother, and never heard love mentioned. This couple begat us children, certainly; but not from love; rather, as an element of the simple life of poor people who have no pastimes. On the other hand I had never heard a cross word pass between them all my life—but is that love? I hardly think so. I think love is a pastime amongst sterile folk in towns, and takes the place of the simple life.</b”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

Love, Life, Children, People

“My mother is probably the wisest person I've ever known. She's not schooled, she's not well read. But she has a philosophy of life that makes well-read people seem like morons.”

Gene Simmons (1949) Israeli-born American rock bass guitarist, singer-songwriter, record producer, entrepreneur, and actor

Fresh Air interview (February 4, 2002)

Life, People, School, Reading

“For me, Christ has always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr. That is how I understood him in 1908 when I used this figure for the first time... It was under the influence of the pogroms. Then I painted and drew him in pictures about ghettos, surrounded by Jewish troubles, by Jewish mothers, running terrified with little children in their arms.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

quote from: From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, Matthew B. Hoffman; Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 218 Chagall started in 1912 (in Paris) to paint his 'Golgotha' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marc_Chagall,_1912,_Calvary_(Golgotha)_Christus_gewidmet,_oil_on_canvas,_174.6_x_192.4_cm,_Museum_of_Modern_Art,_New_York.jpg and later more Crucifixions. In this (later! quote) Chagall looks back on this question. 1910's

Children, Time, Christ, Painting

“(imitating Norman Bates) Mother, are you there? I love you! I never meant to hit you over the head with that shovel!”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Role Model" (Track 9).
1990s, The Slim Shady LP (1999)

Love

“It cannot be denied that God in choosing and destining Mary to be the Mother of his Son, granted her the highest honor.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Calvini Opera, Braunshweig-Berlin, 1863-1900, Volume 45, 348, (1877-78)

God

“One of the most terrifying aspects of publishing stories and books is the realization that they are going to be read, and read by strangers. I had never fully realized this before, although I had of course in my imagination dwelt lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going to be uplifted and enriched and delighted by the stories I wrote. It had simply never occurred to me that these the millions and millions of people might be so far from being uplifted that they would sit down and write me letters I was downright scared to open; of the three-hundred-odd letters that I received that summer I can count only thirteen that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends. Even my mother scolded me: "Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker," she wrote sternly; "it does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write something to cheer people up?"”

Shirley Jackson (1916–1965) novelist, short story writer

Lecture (1960); printed in her collection, Come Along with Me (1968)

People, Books, Imagination, Thinking

“Children love their mothers. Especially with a boy child and his mother, there's a bond that's unbreakable. I love my mother to this day. One of the most painful things I ever had to do was bury her, realizing that even though I was her hero, I couldn't help her with this last thing. I couldn't help her get better. All I wanted was to give her everything she wanted. Everything my father didn't give her, everything she never had.”

Tyler Perry (1966) American actor, director, screenwriter, playwright, producer, author, and songwriter

Interview with Oprah Winfrey

Love, Pain, Children, Boy

“The initial drive was instilled in me when I was little, growing up with a single mom, we struggled a lot. I saw my dad but he wasn't financially supportive at all so we were, for lack of a better word, very poor. But I don't want to be the one with that story of being poor and coming up from it. It was really that my mother instilled in me that drive and sense of urgency and it's always been inside of me.”

Taryn Manning (1978) American actor, musician and fashion designer

Interview, Pop-Rock Candy Mountain (2008-06-11)

Moms, Support, Sense

“It was fitting that such a holy Son should have a holy Mother.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

Ulrich Zwingli E. Stakemeier, De Mariologia et Oecumenismo, K. Balic, ed., (Rome, 1962), p. 456.

“Every drama school in the country turned me down, and so I was lucky to study drama at all, even if it was lowly Birmingham University. But even when I came out with my degree, my mother promptly insisted I go straight to secretarial college to have something to fall back on, just in case – which didn’t exactly fill me with confidence.”

Tamsin Greig (1966) English actress

About studying drama.
From an interview with the Independent on Sunday, "Green Goddess."

School, Confidence, Study, Universe

“My dad turned 40 in October 1967 … in April '68 Martin Luther King was killed. In June '68 Robert Kennedy was killed. And in the fall of '68, my dad's mother died. He was left, on an existential level, saying, "This is what I am. I've got the love of my students and I've got nothing else. My country is going to hell."”

Alec Baldwin (1954) American actor, writer, producer, and comedian

After 1968, he was never the same again. All the air went out of him.
As quoted in "Smart Alec" by Alec Gross, in New York magazine, Vol. 30, No. 35 (24 November 1997), p. 43.

Love, Hell, Country

“Oh, Men, with Sisters dear!
Oh, Men, with Mothers and Wives!
It is not linen you're wearing out,
But human creatures' lives!”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

St. 4.
1840s, The Song of the Shirt (1843)

Men, Sister

“Life as Hunter Thompson's mother was no weenie roast.”

William McKeen (1954) American academic

Source: Outlaw Journalist (2008), Chapter 1, Getting Away With It, p. 1

Life

“[H]ere and now, as always and everywhere, invention is the mother of necessity.”

Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) American academic

Veblen (1914) "The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts". p. 314

“We can accept any and all events in our existence if we believe our mothers love us. For, as I say, she was, and still is, all the world to us.”

John Diamond (doctor) (1934) Australian doctor

Source: The Veneration of Life: Through the Disease to the Soul (1999), p. 54

Love, World

“If you're a single mother with two children—which is the toughest job in America, as far as I'm concerned—you're working hard to put food on your family.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Speech to the Nashua Chamber of Commerce in New Hampshire (27 January 2000), quoted in Fort Worth Star-Telegram (28 January 2000) "Campaign 2000 Highlights From The Campaign Trail Yesterday" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j76bLFbpuLQ#t=0m27s 2000s, 2000

Children, Family, Food

“A widow has two tasks before her, whose duties clash: she is a mother, and yet she must exercise paternal authority.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Une veuve a deux tâches dont les obligations se contredisent: elle est mère et doit exercer la puissance paternelle.
Source: A Bachelor's Establishment (1842), Ch. I.

Exercises

““Well, birth control’s easy. The first thing you have to know is that it doesn’t work.”
“What?”
“Not consistently. No matter how careful you are, every time you play hide-the-salami with the boys, you’re running the risk of ending up with a belly full of consequences.”
“But—”
“Contraceptive spells are never entirely reliable. That’s because their power comes from the Mother, and the Mother wants children. Each cantrip has its loophole, every fetish its flaw. Ultimately, contraception is just a way of luring you into playing her game.”
“You mean that sooner or later it’s going to fail me?”
“That’s not what I said. It works well enough for enough of us that the rest will take their chances. But the odds are never going to be as good as you’d like them to be. There are no guarantees.””

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 10 (pp. 168-169)

Children, Way, Game, Boy

“I called my mother up when they announced the Nobel Prize, waiting until 7 in the morning. She said, “That’s nice — and when are you going to see me next?””

Steven Chu (1948) American physicist, former United States Secretary of Energy, Nobel laureate

NY Times, April 16, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19wwln-q4-t.html?_r=4

Waiting

“I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Books
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Books, Thinking, Reading

“My career was a hollow success, a tissue of fantasies on film. Cheryl loved my mother, and they were both comfortably endowed in my will. I had never before felt or believed I could be in such a dark hole mentally, physically, and worst of all spiritually. All the good in my life—my mother, my child, my work, my friends—was blotted out by the dead feeling that nothing really mattered. I hadnt heard that suicide was a cry for help. To me it meant putting a big stop to the pain and anguish. There was none of that Ill show them. Boy, they'll miss me when Im gone nonsense. I wasnt trying to hurt anyone. I was aware that everyone would go on and survive, but I knew I definitely could not. I wanted out.”

Lana Turner (1921–1995) American actress

On her depression and suicide attempt, p. 158.
Autobiography

Love, Life, Pain, Feeling

“Tranvestism is far more common among men, I noted, because it originates in the primary relation of mother and son.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 508

Men

“She talks about how Brahms baby sat them while her mother, Clara, was out earning a living, concertizing all over Europe. Brahms continued in their lives until his death. She also talks about her loving relationship with her mother; her usual sibling like relationships with the other Schumann children; and how she would get mad at Brahms when he would make her mother sad, even cry, but none of them could be mad at Brahms for very long.”

Harry Markowitz (1927) American economist

On Eugene Schumann http://www.amazon.com/review/R280VQKJ4LC7OI

Love, Death, Children, Sadness

“At the end of the day, don’t forget that you are a person, don’t forget you are a mother, don’t forget you are a wife, don’t forget you are a daughter. Because in the end, no matter how much money you make and how much success you create, What you are left is family, friends and faith.”

Indra Nooyi (1955) Indian-born, naturalized American, business executive

Quoted in "Sun Tzu for Women: The Art of War for Winning in Business" in page=113.

Money, Family, Faith, Success

““Mama’s beautiful?” I asked. “Are you blind?” said my brother. “Don’t you see how men and women are always looking at our mother everywhere she goes. Our mother is more beautiful than any movie star you’ll ever see, and yet this isn’t why papa chose her. He chose her, he’s told us a thousand times, because when he first saw her, she was in line to go into the dance hall over in Carlos Malo with her brother and sister. And when a fight broke out, she didn’t get excited and enjoy it like her sister and the other women. No, she and her brother moved away, wanting no part of it, and so, by seeing this, papa knew that she was a woman of high intelligence, respect, and responsibility; a person that he could trust with his life. And trust, remember, is the foundation of all love, papa says.””

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

Love, Life, Women, Men

“A taxonomy of abilities, like a taxonomy anywhere else in science, is apt to strike a certain type of impatient student as a gratuitous orgy of pedantry. Doubtless, compulsions to intellectual tidiness express themselves prematurely at times, and excessively at others, but a good descriptive taxonomy, as Darwin found in developing his theory, and as Newton found in the work of Kepler, is the mother of laws and theories.”

Raymond Cattell (1905–1998) British-American psychologist

Raymond Cattell (1987), Intelligence: Its Structure, Growth and Action. p. 61

Law, Science, Time

“The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 18, The Perils of the Soul.

Law

“When the busstopped suddenly to avoid
damaging a mother and child in the road, the
younglady in the greenhat sitting opposite
was thrown across me, and not being one to
miss an opportunity i started to makelove”

Roger McGough (1937) British writer and poet

"At Lunchtime A Story of Love", from The Mersey Sound (1967)

“A few things have been eating at me. Was Robin Hood's mother known as Mother Hood? How do you know when you run out of invisible ink? Why does sour cream have an expiration date?”

Larry Andersen (1953) American baseball player

"Now Some Comic Relief" (1989)

“The body means the existence of desire, otherwise it would not have existed. It all ends when one no longer has any desires. C84 In the Company of the Holy Mother. By Her Direct Disciples. Calcutta : Advaita Ashrama, 1980”

Sarada Devi (1853–1920) Hindu religious figure, spiritual consort of Ramakrishna

[In the Company of the Holy Mother, 84]

“A word spoken in season, at the right moment, is the mother of ages.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 561.
1890s and attributed from posthumous publications

Age, Season

“While reading the Times of India each morning, my father spares a minute for the cartoon by R. K. Laxman. While my mother is, like a magician, making untidy sheets disappear in the bedroom and producing fresh towels in the bathroom, or braving bad weather in the kitchen, my father, in the extraordinary Chinese calm of the drawing-room, is dmiring the cartoon by R. K. Laxman, and, if my mother happens to be there, unselfishly sharing it with her. She, as expected, misunderstands it completely, laughing not at the joke but at the expressions on the faces of the caricatures, and at the hilarious fact that they talk to each other like human beings.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Afternoon Raag (1993)

Time, Reading, Drawing, Weather

“Why should we fear that which will come to all that is?
We cannot tell, we do not know, which is the greater blessing — life or death. We do not know whether the grave is the end of this life, or the door of another, or whether the night here is not somewhere else at dawn. Neither can we tell which is the more fortunate — the child dying in its mother's arms, before its lips have learned to form a word, or he who journeys all the length of life's uneven road, painfully taking the last slow steps with staff and crutch.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

At A Child's Grave (1882)

Life, Death, Fear, Learning

“I am everything
Tonight I'll be your mother— I will
Do such things to ease your pain
Free your mind and you won't feel ashamed.”

Sophie B. Hawkins (1967) American musician

Tongues and Tails (1992), Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover

Pain, Feeling

“Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. One English critic took me to task for not saying that Genet was "afraid of intimacy" all his life because he'd been abandoned by his mother at the age of seven months. All the evidence needed to make such an interpretation is in my book, but I don't myself draw the vulgar conclusion. Since most literary biographies ignore the work except for potted plot summaries, they strip the biographee of everything redeeming and leave his or her subject to this spiteful revenge, this half-baked Freudian-Christian-bourgeois moralizing.”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

Self-interview, Dalkey Archive Press (1994).
Articles and Interviews

Life, People, Books, Age

“It would have to be considered from the Imperial point of view whether the system of reciprocal tariffs would really bind the mother country more closely with her colonies than was now the case…how Great Britain might have annually to submit to the pressure of various colonies who were discontented with the tariff as then modified and wanted it modified still further. If they considered Great Britain as a target at which all these proposals for modification and rectification would be addressed, he thought it would occur to their Chamber that it would not altogether add to the harmony of those relations to have these shifting tariffs existing between Great Britain and her colonies. (Cheers)…He thought we should have some form of direct representation from the colonies to guide us and advise us with regard to this question of tariffs…Under a system of free trade every branch of industry did not prosper. He was interested in the landed industry (hear), and he did not know that the land industry had prospered particularly under free trade…he thought it could not be denied that under a system of free trade large tracts of country had been turned out of cultivation, that our own food supply had been diminished, and that the population which had been reared in the rural districts had ceased to be reared in those districts…he was not a person who believed that free trade was part of the Sermon on the Mount, and that we ought to receive it in all its rigidity as a divinely-appointed dispensation.”

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847–1929) British politician

Speech to the Burnley chamber of commerce (19 May 1903) in the aftermath of Joseph Chamberlain's speech advocating Imperial Preference tariffs on imports, as reported in The Times (20 May 1903), p. 12. The Times reported Rosebery's speech in third person.

Food, Question, Parting, Personality

“It was a family name on my mother's side, and I thought my own name Pratt, if I ever got known in the theatre might be unfortunate.”

Boris Karloff (1887–1969) English actor

This is your Life Boris Karloff https://archive.org/details/TIYL_Boris_Karloff (1957)

Family

“If they (the ASME) had not been (aware of human problems involved) — and Taylor either failed to encounter, or to recognize the significance of, the early work in industrial psychology contributed by Walter Dill Scott, Hugo Munsterberg, and others — there was the amazing fact that one of them, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, happened to fall in love with a girl who was a psychologist by education, a teacher by profession, and a mother by vocation. I know of no occurrence in the whole history of human thought more worthy of the epithet "providential" than that fact. Here were three engineers — Taylor, Gantt, and Gilbreth — struggling to realize the wider implications of their technique, in travail with a "mental revolution," their great danger that they might not appreciate the difference between applying scientific thinking to material things and to human beings, and one of them married Lillian Moller, a woman who by training, by instinct, and by experience was deeply aware of human beings, the perfect mental complement in the work to which they had set their hands.”

Lyndall Urwick (1891–1983) British management consultant

Cited in: Harold F. Smiddy and Lionel Naum. " Evolution of a "Science of Managing" in America https://archive.org/details/selectedreadings00shul," in: Selected readings in management, Fremont A. Shull (edd), 1957. p. 16-17 1950s, "Management's Debt to the Engineers", 1952

Love, Education, History, Girl

“My God! I have often regretted that I was born! I have often wished to fall back even into nothingness, rather than advance through so many falsehoods, so many sufferings, and so many successive losses, towards that loss of ourselves which we call death! Still, even in those moments of terrible faintheartedness, when despair overmasters reason, and when man forgets that life is a task imposed upon him to finish, I have always said to myself: "There are some things which I would regret not to have tasted — a mother's milk, a father's love, that relationship of heart and soul between brothers, household affections, joys, and even cares!" Our family is evidently our second self, more than self, existing before self, and surviving self with the better part of self. It is the image of the holy and loving unity of beings revealed by the small group of creatures who hold to one another, and made visible by feeling!”

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) French writer, poet, and politician

Book I, Note II, p. 19
Les confidences (1849)

Love, Life, Death, God

“If we all spring from a single father and mother, Adam and Eve, how can they claim or prove that they are lords more than us, except by making us produce and grow the wealth which they spend? They are clad in velvet and camlet lined with squirrel and ermine, while we go dressed in coarse cloth. They have the wines, the spices and the good bread: we have the rye, the husks and the straw, and we drink water. They have shelter and ease in their fine manors, and we have hardship and toil, the wind and the rain in the fields. And from us must come, from our labour, the things which keep them in luxury”

Jean Froissart (1337–1405) French writer

Et, se venons tout d'un père et d'une mere, Adam et Eve, en quoi poent il dire ne monstrer que il sont mieux signeur que nous, fors parce que il nous font gaaignier et labourer ce que il despendent? Il sont vestu de velours et de camocas fourés de vair et de gris, et nous sommes vesti de povres draps. Il ont les vins, les espisses et les bons pains, et nous avons le soille, le retrait et le paille, et buvons l'aige. Ils ont le sejour et les biaux manoirs, et nous avons le paine et le travail, et le pleue et le vent as camps, et faut que de nous viengne et de nostre labeur ce dont il tiennent les estas.
Book 2, p. 212.
Froissart is again quoting John Ball.
Chroniques (1369–1400)

Spring, Drink, Water, Wine

“You must be a bastard for I knew your mother's husband and he was a gentleman and honest man.”

Thaddeus Stevens (1792–1868) American politician

In Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens

“You are confused, because you believe that you are in the world, not the world in you. Who came first – you or your parents? You imagine that you were born at a certain time and place, that you have a father and a mother, a body and a name. This is your sin and your calamity! (…)”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Self-identification
Source: "I am That." P.42

World, Imagination, Parent, Time

“When you serve your mother and father it is okay to try to correct them once in a while. But if you see that they are not going to listen to you, keep your respect for them and don't distance yourself from them. Work without complaining.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Analects, Other chapters

“My family were of good English peasant class from St. John's Wood. My father dealt in stocks and shares and my mother also had a lot of time on her hands.”

Hermione Gingold (1897–1987) English actress

The World is Square [her autobiography], Pt. I. Pub. 1945 by Home & Van Thal Ltd.

Family, Time

“The root of the problem is that domesticated animals have inherited from their wild ancestors many physical, emotional and social needs that are redundant in human farms. Farmers routinely ignore these needs without paying any economic price. They lock animals in tiny cages, mutilate their horns and tails, separate mothers from offspring, and selectively breed monstrosities.”

Yuval Noah Harari (1976) Israeli historian

Introduction to Animal Liberation

Problem, Animals

“It's me versus Mother Nature and me versus me. I want to see how far a human can fly with six kilograms of high-tech nylon over his head with no engine. Ultimately though, I love being able to fly like a bird.”

Godfrey Wenness (1967)

"SMH Article 3 Feb 2007" http://www.smh.com.au/news/new-south-wales/the-thriller-in-manilla/2007/02/01/1169919460467.html?page=3

Love, Nature, Bird, Flying

“Since, though I do not repent my amorous exploits, I am far from wanting my example to contribute to the corruption of the fair sex, which deserves our homage for so many reasons, I hope that my observations will foster prudence in fathers and mothers and thus at least deserve their esteem.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

History of My Life (trans. Trask 1967), 1997 reprint, v. 8, chapter 4, p. 110
Referenced

Hope, Sex

“A very distinguished colleague began his criticism of this show by asking what is Mr Astaire's secret. May I suggest that the solution hangs on a little word of three letters? Mr Astaire's secret is that of the late Rudolph Valentino and of Mr Maurice Chevalier — sex, but sex so bejewelled and be-pixied that the weaker vessels who fall for it can pretend that it isn't sex at all but a sublimated projection of the Little Fellow with the Knuckles in His Eyes. You'd have thought by the look of the first night foyer that it was Mothering Thursday, since every woman in the place was urgent to take to her bosom this waif with the sad eyes and the twinkling feet.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Theatre critic James Agate in a review of a 1933 London performance of Gay Divorce as quoted in Cooke, Alistair. "Fred Astaire Obituary", Letter From America, BBC World Service, June 28, 1987.

Secret, Sadness, Sex, Night

“Yet, we are well assured that learning did not form any prominent feature in the education of a young nobleman during the Saxon government: it is notorious, that Alfred the Great was twelve years of age before he learned to read; and that he owed his knowledge of letters to accident, rather than to the intention of his tutors. A book adorned with paintings in the hands of his mother, attracted his notice, and he expressed his desire to have it: she promised to comply with his request on condition that he learned to read it, which it seems he did; and this trifling incident laid the groundwork of his future scholarship.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

xx
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Education

Books, Age, Education, Knowledge

“Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me.”

H. G. Wells book The War of the Worlds

Book II, Ch. 8 (Ch. 25 in editions without Book divisions): Dead London
The War of the Worlds (1898)

Fear, Night

“Narrated Abu Hurairah: A man came to Allah's Messenger and said, "Who is more entitled to be treated with the best companionship by me?" The Prophet said, "Your mother." The man said. "Who is next?" The Prophet said, "Your mother." The man further said, "Who is next?" The Prophet said, "Your mother." The man asked for the fourth time, "Who is next?"”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

The Prophet said, "Your father."
Sahih al-Bukhari, 8:2
Sunni Hadith

Time

“Poor Jenny, bright as a penny!
Her equal would be hard to find.
She lost one dad and mother,
A sister and a brother--
But she would make up her mind.”

Ira Gershwin (1896–1983) American lyricist

"The Saga of Jenny", Lady in the Dark

Sister

“The story of his own connection with the cabin had never been told him. The language of the apes had so few words that they could talk but little of what they had seen in the cabin, having no words to accurately describe either the strange people or their belongings, and so, long before Tarzan was old enough to understand, the subject had been forgotten by the tribe.
Only in a dim, vague way had Kala explained to him that his father had been a strange white ape, but he did not know that Kala was not his own mother.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 6 : Jungle Battles

People, Way, Understanding

“Seán Óg Ó hAilpín…. his father's from Fermanagh, his mother's from Fiji, neither a hurling stronghold.”

Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh (1930) Gaelic games commentator

Famous quotes, Miscellaneous

“[I]f we’re going to jeer at North Korea for being a de facto monarchy, we must also acknowledge the main advantage of such a system: no divisive squabbling over who has the right to rule. On my book tour for “The Cleanest Race” I used the example of my British mother: a firm supporter of the monarchy with different estimations of the various royals. She doesn’t like the idea of Charles becoming king, but accepts that it will and must happen.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Interview with Joshua Stanton (August 2017)

Books, Idea, Support

“And, because of the life that I shared with these two amazing women [her mother and maternal grandmother] and the hardships and struggles that I saw them overcome, I learned an invaluable lesson: and that is that women can do anything we set our minds to... and then some!”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

address to LULAC (July 1, 2005)
2007, 2008

Life, Women, Learning, Maternity

“Can you explain to the mothers
And the fathers of those
Who come riding home in coffins
In their military clothes?”

Tom Morello (1964) American guitarist and singer-songwriter

Battle Hymns.
Lyrics

Home, Clothes

“(Mother's Day) is a tough holiday for Rahm Emanuel because he's not used to saying the word "day" after "mother."”

Rahm Emanuel (1959) politician, investment banker, White House Chief of Staff

President Barack Obama, during the 2009 White House Correspondents Dinner. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-white-house-correspondents-association-dinner-592009 About

Holiday

Quotes about mother page 12

Quotes about mother
page 12