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Mother's Day Quotes

Most of what you will see here is about love in general, because the Mother page itself is short. The page is assembled from the pages on mothers, love and gratitude.

If you want quotes that are actually about mothers, the Mother page has fewer but more precise ones. For anything you plan to print or say out loud, check the source line and the label next to it.

Random quote on Mother's Day

Most quoted on mother's day:

The boat that took my love away
He sent again to me
To tell me that he would not sleep
Alone beneath the sea.

Stevie Smith Selected Poems (1962)

Oh I'm in love with the janitor's boy,
And the janitor's boy loves me;
He's going to hunt for a desert isle
In our geography.

Nathalia Crane The Janitor's Boy And Other Poems (1924)

Look how your children grow up. Taught from their earliest infancy to curb their love natures — restrained at every turn!

Voltairine de Cleyre Sex Slavery (1890)

Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third. (p666)

Marge Piercy Gone to Soldiers (1987)

I love being Spanish as much as I love being Irish, and I really love being Irish.

Martin Sheen Inside the Actors Studio (1994)

The materials, the colors, were like friendship and love, both wanting to fulfill themselves in the most beautiful form.

Emil Nolde

And the love we hold, and the love we spurn,
Will never grow cold, only taciturn

Joanna Newsom The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004)

In this life, who did you love,
beneath the drifting ashes,
beneath the sheeting banks of air
that barrenly bore our rations?

Joanna Newsom Have One On Me (2010)

I have opinions that are based on the facts that are presented to me. I don't apologize. I stand by it. If I'm hated, so what? If I'm loved, so what?

Stephen A. Smith

When a man mourns for someone who has played him false, it is not for love of her, but for his own humiliation at not having deserved her trust.

Cesare Pavese This Business of Living (1935)

Uccello cello cello
I love myself.

Peter Levi

But love is such a mystery,
I cannot find it out;
For when I think I'm best resolv'd,
I then am most in doubt.

John Suckling Last Remains (1659)

Superstition saw
Something it had never seen before:
Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,
Beauty so sudden for that time of year.

Jean Toomer Poems from Cane (1923)

Your father bears an iron reed
Filled with a flame that makes us bleed;
Your kindly mother loves to tear
Feathers and skin to deck her hair.

Edward Andrade

I pray thee leave, love me no more,
Call home the heart you gave me,
I but in vain the saint adore,
That can, but will not, save me.

Michael Drayton

We realized that our fathers, brothers and uncles had been lying, and that .no one was ever going to love us for our good grades.

Jeffrey Eugenides The Virgin Suicides (1993)

The mighty Jove did love us. Did? He does.
There is a spell of unresisted power
In wonder-working weak simplicity,
Because it is not fear'd.

Hartley Coleridge Poems (1851)

I hate the sin, but I love the sinner.

Thomas Buchanan Read A Summer Story, Sheridan's Ride, and Other Poems (1865)

Music that I really love and believe in and think is extraordinarily honest and beautiful doesn't always become popular. (Oct, 1994 interview).

Anthony Kiedis

For loves lawe is out of reule.

John Gower

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