By our unofficial count, Mother’s Day is celebrated in more than 50 countries around the world. Today (May 14) is a day of joyous reflection. We honor our mothers in prose and verse.
I will look after you and I will look after anybody you say needs to be looked after, any way you say. I am
here. I brought my whole self to you. I am your mother.
-Maya Angelou
And all my mother came into mine eyes and gave me up to tears.
-William Shakespeare
The clocks were striking midnight and the rooms were very still as a figure glided quietly from bed to bed, smoothing a coverlid here, settling a pillow there, and pausing long and tenderly at each unconscious face, to kiss each with lips that mutely blessed, and to pray the fervent prayers which only mothers utter.
– Louisa May Alcott
Heaven lies beneath the feet of mothers.
-Quran
The fingering of a mother’s hand is like the handful of water for one in want of it.
-Sanskrit saying
The honor of the people lies in the moccasin tracks of the woman.
-Native American saying
Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother’s voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.
-Toni Morrison
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
Mother to Son
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
-Langston Hughes
Every frog is a gazelle in the eyes of its mother.
-African proverb
God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.
-Rudyard Kipling
Go take the mother’s soul and learn three truths: Learn What dwells in man, What is not given to man, and What men live by. When thou hast learnt these things, thou shalt return to heaven.
-Leo Tolstoy
Mother is the name for God in the lips and heats of little children.
-William Makepeace Thackerary
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
-Honore de Balzac
A mother is she who can take the place of all others but whose place no one can take.
-Cardinal Meymillod
Art is the child of nature in whom we trace the features of the mothers face.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Life doesn’t come with a manual, it comes with a mother.
-Unknown