Motherhood famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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Don't let's go to the dogs tonight, For mother will be there.
-- A. P. Herbert -
Before you count the profit, count the cost of a working mother.
-- A. Theodore Tuttle -
Women who miscalculate are called mothers.
-- Abigail Van Buren -
We are about to make motherhood a crime. No civilized government in the history of mankind has ever done this.
-- Adrian G. Duplantier -
We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.
-- Adrienne Rich -
Even prior to marriage and motherhood, it's always been about prioritising and focusing on what you can commit to. That's been my approach to every aspect of my life, be it my relationships or my professional commitments.
-- Aishwarya Rai Bachchan -
I've always been the kind of person that if I take on anything professionally it means commitment to me, so you take it on if you can commit to it and if you know you can accommodate and give your best to it and that's what you do, and I have always done that throughout my life - before marriage, after marriage, before motherhood, after motherhood.
-- Aishwarya Rai Bachchan -
Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
-- Alice Walker -
And do respect the women of the world; remember you all had mothers.
-- Allen Toussaint -
The software program for motherhood is impossible to fully download into the male brain. You give them two tasks and they're like, 'I have to change the baby and get the dry cleaning?'
-- Allison Pearson -
~One surprise of motherhood for me was how little control I have. I thought it would be a blissful romance with me at the helm, cuddling this little creature. It's been bittersweet and humbling to let her lead and to not try to be perfect myself.~
-- Amanda Peet -
You have to put your own oxygen mask before you put on others... It's a good metaphor for parenting
-- Amanda Peet -
There's people constantly asking you for something on set, so the multi-tasking of motherhood transfers very well to being a director. And I think you're compassionate.
-- Angelina Jolie -
Motherhood was my career. I'm totally satisfied with that.
-- Ann Romney -
Women wear many hats in their lives. Daughter, sister, student, breadwinner. But no matter where we are or what we’re doing, one hat that moms never take off is the crown of motherhood. There is no crown more glorious.
-- Ann Romney -
Motherhood is a hallowed place because children aren’t commonplace. Co-laboring over the sculpting of souls is a sacred vocation, a humbling privilege. Never forget.
-- Ann Voskamp -
The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.
-- Anna Quindlen -
We've made hyper motherhood a measure of female success.
-- Anna Quindlen -
And yet the true creator is necessity, which is the mother of invention.
-- Aristotle -
I stand fearlessly for small dogs, the American Flag, motherhood and the Bible. That's why people love me.
-- Art Linkletter -
There is a particular quality of quietude and stillness that suffuses these painterly poems of Carol Ann Davis, so involved with loss, motherhood and the shifting tonalities of light that transform the domestic and ordinary into the strange and extraordinary that, combined with tenderness of address, approach the worshipful and make a number of these poems so moving and distinctive.
-- August Kleinzahler -
I am consumed, or I have been consumed, with these issues of motherhood and the way we act out societal expectations and roles. So both my nonfiction and my fiction have been pretty much exclusively about that.
-- Ayelet Waldman -
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.
-- Ayn Rand -
Labor is like motherhood to most of our political leaders: a calling so fine and noble that it would be sullied by talk of vulgar, mundane things like pay.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich -
As a general rule, when something gets elevated to apple-pie status in the hierarchy of American values, you have to suspect that its actual monetary value is skidding toward zero. Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent. Same thing with work: would we be so reverent about the 'work ethic' if it wasn't for the fact that the average working stiff's hourly pay is shrinking, year by year ...
-- Barbara Ehrenreich -
it used to be almost the first question (just after 'Can you type?') in the standard female job interview: 'Are you now, or have you ever, contemplated marriage, motherhood, or the violent overthrow of the U.S. government?
-- Barbara Ehrenreich -
Motherhood: if it were going to be easy, it never would have started with something called labor.
-- Barbara Johnson -
Sooner or later we all quote our mothers.
-- Bernard Williams -
I think that love is more like a light that you carry. At first childish happiness keeps it lighted and after that romance. Then motherhood lights it and then duty . . . and maybe after that sorrow. You wouldn't think that sorrow could be a light, would you, dearie? But it can. And then after that, service lights it. Yes. . . . I think that is what love is to a woman . . . a lantern in her hand.
-- Bess Streeter Aldrich -
In many ways, being pregnant and working were more difficult than motherhood.
-- Bethenny Frankel -
Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.
-- Betty Friedan -
What had really caused the women's movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women's life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn't live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was "the problem that had no name." Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.
-- Betty Friedan -
unlike a disappointing marriage, disappointing motherhood cannot be terminated by divorce.
-- Betty Rollin -
Watergate provides a model case study of the interaction and powers of each of the branches of government. It also is a morality play with a sad and dramatic ending.
-- Bob Woodward -
I'm loving motherhood. It's way harder than soccer, but I love a challenge.
-- Brandi Chastain -
Becoming a mom allowed me to just relax in a way I never had before. I used to care a lot about what I looked like in public or what people thought of me. I care at least 40 percent less now.
-- Busy Philipps -
Perhaps there will come a time when... an unmarried mother will not be despised because of her motherhood... and when the right of the unborn to be born will not be denied or interfered with.
-- Caroline Norton -
Motherhood has brought me many joys and insights, but the new perspective it granted me on the role I had inadvertently played in young women's lives for the 2 decades I spent in the modeling industry was downright sobering.
-- Carre Otis -
I've always been so apathetic. I figured, OK, maybe the world is going to fall down around me. Now I want to make a better world... that's motherhood.
-- Cass Elliot -
Motherhood to me is something that I always wanted, but never quite knew how it was going to happen.
-- Catherine Zeta-Jones -
Sometimes I stand there going, 'I'm not doing any of this right!' And then I get this big man belch out of her, and I go, 'Ah, we accomplished this together.'
-- Christina Applegate -
Honestly, on so many levels, I feel like motherhood has prepared me even better for directing than film school because all it is is troubleshooting and dealing with different personalities and emotions and trying to make everybody happy and at the end of the day reaching your own personal goals and agendas.
-- Christine Swanson -
I always wanted children, but not until they were actually part of my life did I realize that I could love that fiercely, or get that angry.
-- Cokie Roberts -
There's no doubt that motherhood is the best thing in my life. It's all that really matters.
-- Courteney Cox -
Coco is the greatest part of my life. I love everything about being a mom, but our talks and walks on the beach are my favorite moments.
-- Courteney Cox -
Until women learn to want economic independence, and until they work out a way to get this independence without denying themselves the joys of love and motherhood, it seems to me feminism has no roots.
-- Crystal Eastman -
Motherhood is the only thing in my life that I've really known for sure is something I wanted to do.
-- Cynthia Nixon -
We do not diminish the value of what women or men achieve in any worthy endeavor or career -- we all benefit from their achievements -- but still recognize that there is not a higher good than motherhood and fatherhood in marriage. There is no superior career, and no amount of money, authority or public acclaim can exceed the ultimate rewards of family.
-- D. Todd Christofferson -
It's incredible. Everything you ever thought about love just becomes night and day. I mean, you never thought you could love that much. You rediscover the world, and it's just a beautiful thing.
-- David Arquette -
True motherhood is the noblest call of the world, and we look with sorrow upon the practice here in our own United States of limiting families, a tendency creeping into our own Church.
-- David O. McKay -
Motherhood is the one thing in all the world which most truly exemplifies the God-given virtues of creating and sacrificing. Though it carries the woman close to the brink of death, motherhood also leads her into the very realm of the fountains of life and makes her co-partner with the Creator in bestowing upon eternal spirits mortal life.
-- David O. McKay -
Motherhood is wonderful, but it's also hard work. It's the logistics more than anything. You discover you have reserves of energy you didn't know you had.
-- Deborah Mailman -
The biggest surprise, which is also the best, is that I didn't know I would love motherhood as much as I do.
-- Deborah Norville -
My mother was a personal friend of God's. They had ongoing conversations.
-- Della Reese -
I had a career and I came to motherhood late and am not married and have never had such a trusting relationship with a man - and trust is where the real power of love comes from.
-- Diane Keaton -
I don't want to let my life as a woman pass me by. There's a time to work, there's a time to be young and crazy, and there should be a time to enjoy motherhood. I'm actually looking forward to that.
-- Diane Kruger -
Motherhood is a choice you make every day, to put someone else's happiness and well-being ahead of your own, to teach the hard lessons, to do the right thing even when you're not sure what the right thing is... and to forgive yourself, over and over again, for doing everything wrong.
-- Donna Ball -
Feminists have emphasized for a long time the importance of each woman's individual entity and the necessity of economic independence. Perhaps it was necessary. But now I think we need some emphasis on the instinctive side of life, sex and motherhood.... Life isn't all earning your living. Unfortunately we fall in love and Feminism must take that into consideration.
-- Dora Russell -
We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them. Nor should we represent motherhood as something so common and easy that everyone can go through it without harm or suffering and rear her children competently and well.
-- Dora Russell -
I've approached so many things in my life with such intensity that I want to approach motherhood with dedication and focus.
-- Drew Barrymore -
I never really wanted kids. I didn't not want them, but motherhood just wasn't something that pulled at me.
-- Edie Falco -
Motherhood is, after all, woman's great and incomparable work.
-- Edward Carpenter -
Young women you will be the ones who will provide the example of virtuous womanhood and motherhood. You will continue to be virtuous lovely praiseworthy and of good report. You will also be the ones to provide an example of family life in a time when families are under attack, being redefined and disintegrating. You will understand your roles and your responsibilities and thus will see no need to lobby for rights.
-- Elaine S. Dalton -
Pregnancy and motherhood are the most beautiful and significantly life-altering events that I have ever experienced.
-- Elisabeth Hasselbeck -
So mothers have God's license to be missed.
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning -
The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism. That the honorable term 'female physician' should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become a noble position for women.
-- Elizabeth Blackwell -
Though motherhood is the most important of all the professions - requiring more knowledge than any other department in human affairs - there was no attention given to preparation for this office.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton -
I have met few men in my life, worth repeating eight times.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton -
Cultural expectations shade and color the images that parents-to-be form. The baby product ads, showing a woman serenely holding her child, looking blissfully and mysteriously contented, or the television parents, wisely and humorously solving problems, influence parents-to-be.
-- Ellen Galinsky -
The central paradox of motherhood is that while our children become the absolute center of our lives, they must also push us backout in the world.... But motherhood that can narrow our lives can also broaden them. It can make us focus intensely on the moment and invest heavily in the future.
-- Ellen Goodman -
Suddenly she was here. And I was no longer pregnant; I was a mother. I never believed in miracles before.
-- Ellen Greene -
I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.
-- Emma Goldman -
In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap, our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us.
-- Erica Jong -
I believe that women should live for love, for motherhood and for intellect, and I believe we shouldn't have to choose. And I believe that's always been difficult for women, to express themselves intellectually, maternally, and passionately.
-- Erica Jong -
It's [motherhood] the biggest on-the-job- training program in existence today.
-- Erma Bombeck -
Oh, what a power is motherhood, possessing a potent spell. Love, Light, Blessings
-- Euripides -
Combining paid employment with marriage and motherhood creates safeguards for emotional well-being. Nothing is certain in life, but generally the chances of happiness are greater if one has multiple areas of interest and involvement. To juggle is to diminish the risk of depression, anxiety, and unhappiness.
-- Faye J Crosby -
Motherhood has been an exercise in guilt.
-- Felicity Huffman -
Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family. But here again, because there is nothing to sell, there is a very general disposition to regard a married woman's work as no work at all, and to take it as a matter of course that she should not be paid for it.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
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.
-- George Eliot -
Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat.
-- George Eliot -
[Motherhood is] the biggest gamble in the world. It is the glorious life force. It's huge and scary-it's an act of infinite optimism.
-- Gilda Radner -
Motherhood . . . is an act of infinite optimism.
-- Gilda Radner -
To give life another being, what a gift! When he finally was placed into my arms, I looked into his precious eyes and felt an overwhelming, unconditial love... I never felt so complete and empowered in my life.
-- Gisele Bundchen -
Motherhood is the most dangerous and awesome relationship possible. ... The parent/child blood relationship is one-sided and irrevocable and enduring. And it is all rather humbling.
-- Glenda Jackson -
To counter-balance the natural humility of motherhood, I garden ... In the garden, more than any place, I really feel successful.
-- Glenda Jackson -
Motherhood is... difficult and... rewarding.
-- Gloria Estefan -
Do without if you need to, but don't do without mother.
-- H. Burke Peterson -
Motherhood sort of puts things into perspective, and it's bout real life, and life is about people, what we give, what we take, what we share.
-- Halle Berry -
Feeling inadequate is an occupational hazard of motherhood.
-- Harriet Lerner -
This is part of the essence of motherhood, watching your kid grow into her own person and not being able to do anything about it. Otherwise children would be nothing more than pets.
-- Heather Armstrong -
Happiness... consists in giving, and in serving others.
-- Henry Drummond
