It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself… it seems unfair. You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do—or don’t do.
—Simone de Beauvoir, 1966Quotes
God is our father, but even more is God our mother.
—Pope John Paul I, 1978Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.
—Mark Twain, c. 1900All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
—Oscar Wilde, 1895He that raises a large family, does indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand…a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1786If parents would only realize how they bore their children!
—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
—H.L. Mencken, 1919As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
—Pope John Paul II, 1986Men are what their mothers made them.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1955Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.
—Rebecca West, 1959He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
—Francis Bacon, 1625Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.
—Albert Camus, 1942