C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Mother
A mother is a mother still—the holiest thing alive.
Heaven is at the feet of mothers.
All that I am, my mother made me.
Nature’s loving proxy, the watchful mother.
The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom.
Men are what their mothers made them.
A babe is a mother’s anchor.
Where there is a mother in the house, matters speed well.
One good mother is worth a hundred school masters.
“An ounce of mother,” says the Spanish proverb, “is worth a pound of clergy.”
But one on earth is better than the wife; that is the mother.
I would desire for a friend the son who never resisted the tears of his mother.
The future destiny of the child is always the work of the mother.
At first babes feed on the mother’s bosom, but always on her heart.
If there be aught surpassing human deed or word or thought it is a mother’s love!
A mother’s prayers, silent and gentle, can never miss the road to the throne of all bounty.
Maternal love! thou word that sums all bliss.
Mother is the name of God in the lips and hearts of little children.
France needs nothing so much to promote her regeneration as good mothers.
What instruction the baby brings to the mother!
No language can express the power and beauty and heroism of a mother’s love.
The bearing and the training of a child is woman’s wisdom.
The only love which on this teeming earth asks no return for passion’s wayward birth.
His sweetest dreams were still of that dear voice that soothed his infancy.
I have not wept these forty years; but now my mother comes afresh into my eyes.
A mother’s love, in a degree, sanctifies the most worthless offspring.
Unhappy is the man for whom his own mother has not made all other mothers venerable.
If the whole world were put into one scale, and my mother into the other, the world would kick the beam.
Mother love***hath this unlikeness to any other love: Tender to the object, it can be infinitely tyrannical to itself, and thence all its power of self-sacrifice.
I think it must somewhere be written that the virtues of mothers shall, occasionally, be visited on their children, as well as the sins of fathers.
A mother is as different from anything else that God ever thought of, as can possibly be. She is a distinct and individual creation.
There is in all this cold and hollow world no fount of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within a mother’s heart.
What are Raphael’s Madonnas but the shadow of a mother’s love, fixed in permanent outline forever?
When God thought of mother, He must have laughed with satisfaction, and framed it quickly—so rich, so deep, so divine, so full of soul, power, and beauty, was the conception.
The future of society is in the hands of the mothers. If the world was lost through woman, she alone can save it.
The mother’s love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence.
The child takes most of his nature of the mother, besides speech, manners, and inclination.
A grandam’s name is little less in love than is the doting title of a mother; they are as children but one step below.
One lamp, thy mother’s love, amid the stars shall lift its pure flame changeless, and before the throne of God burn through eternity.
A mother has, perhaps, the hardest earthly lot; and yet no mother worthy of the name ever gave herself thoroughly for her child who did not feel that, after all, she reaped what she had sown.
The instruction received at the mother’s knee, and the paternal lessons, together with the pious and sweet souvenirs of the fireside, are never effaced entirely from the soul.
It is generally admitted, and very frequently proved, that virtue and genius, and all the natural good qualities which men possess, are derived from their mothers.
No mother who stands upon low ground herself can hope to place her children upon a loftier plane. They may reach it, but it will not be through her.
In after-life you may have friends—fond, dear friends; but never will you have again the inexpressible love and gentleness lavished upon you which none but a mother bestows.
A mother should give her children a superabundance of enthusiasm, that after they have lost all they are sure to lose on mixing with the world, enough may still remain to prompt and support them through great actions.
Even He who died for us upon the cross, in the last hour, in the unutterable agony of death, was mindful of His mother, as if to teach us that this holy love should be our last worldly thought—the last point of earth from which the soul should take its flight for heaven.
A mother’s love is indeed the golden link that binds youth to age; and he is still but a child, however time may have furrowed his cheek, or silvered his brow, who can yet recall, with a softened heart, the fond devotion or the gentle chidings of the best friend that God ever gives us.
The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated, except by those whose feelings are withered by vitiated society. Holy, simple, and beautiful in its construction, it is the emblem of all we can imagine of fidelity and truth.
Observe how soon, and to what a degree, this influence begins to operate! Her first ministration for her infant is to enter, as it were, the valley of the shadow of death, and win its life at the peril of her own! How different must an affection thus founded be from all others!
The loss of a mother is always keenly felt, even if her health be such as to incapacitate her from taking an active part in the care of the family. She is the sweet rallying-point for affection, obedience, and a thousand tendernesses. Dreary the blank when she is withdrawn!
Mother, when your children are irritable, do not make them more so by scolding and fault-finding, but correct their irritability by good nature and mirthfulness. Irritability comes from errors in food, bad air, too little sleep, a necessity for change of scene and surroundings; from confinement in close rooms, and lack of sunshine.
Never, never has one forgotten his pure, right-educating mother! On the blue mountains of our dim childhood, towards which we ever turn and look, stand the mothers who marked out to us from thence our life; the most blessed age must be forgotten ere we can forget the warmest heart. You wish, O woman, to be ardently loved, and forever, even till death. Be, then, the mothers of your children.
Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat; it turns timidity into fierce courage, and dreadless defiance into tremulous submission; it turns thoughtlessness into foresight, and yet stills all anxiety into calm content; it makes selfishness become self-denial, and gives even to hard vanity the glance of admiring love.
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; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world’s condemnation, a mother still loves on, and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still she remembers the infant smiles that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful shout of his childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can never be brought to think him all unworthy.
When Eve was brought unto Adam, he became filled with the Holy Spirit, and gave her the most sanctified, the most glorious of appellations. He called her Eva—that is to say, the Mother of All. He did not style her wife, but simply mother—mother of all living creatures. In this consists the glory and the most precious ornament of woman.