May The Tenth

Thoughts About Motherhood
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
-- Honore' de Balzac

The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom.
-- Henry Ward Beecher

Youth fades; love droops,
the leaves of friendship fall;
A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Becoming a mother makes you the mother of all children. From now on each wounded, abandoned, frightened child is yours. You live in the suffering mothers of every race and creed and weep with them. You long to comfort all who are desolate.
-- Charlotte Gray

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

Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.
-- Elizabeth Stone

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 troubles thicken 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

All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother.
--Abraham Lincoln

My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her.
-- George Washington

A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.
-- Dorothy Canfield Fisher