Top 171 Motherhood Quotes

Motherhood is the most beautiful thing that can happen to a woman.

Mother’s Day, like motherhood itself, is fraught with peril. There are so many ways to get it wrong, so many opportunities to disappoint and be disappointed.

As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.

A lot of my friends aren’t parents. I find this culture of all-consuming motherhood so oppressive. Not that I don’t like to talk about my kids, but if I’m socializing, I don’t want to talk about Montessori versus Waldorf.

Motherhood, pester power and emotional blackmail – Indian marketers have cottoned on to the fact that these three themes can sell just about anything – from food and toys, to insurance products, tonics, televisions and air-conditioners.

Motherhood is exhausting, but you get to know the deeper ramifications of it as you go along.

I much prefer grandmotherhood to motherhood.

I grew up with six girls and one boy, so my innate instinct of who I am – I’m the third oldest, and I helped raise all of my younger sisters. I just fall into that aspect – that motherhood – naturally.

Now that virtually every career is an option for ambitious girls, it can no longer be considered regressive or reactionary to reintroduce discussion of marriage and motherhood to primary education. We certainly do not want to return to the simplistic duality of home economics classes for girls and wood shop for boys.

Spanish children are too often ill-cared for, but despite the abuses of ignorant motherhood and fatherhood, such vivid, vivacious, bewitching little people as they are!

I want to understand rites of passage I’ve never experienced, like motherhood.

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.

I felt this during the first few months of my motherhood. You lose who you are – you lose your identity – because when your baby comes, you give, give, give, and no one gives back, and you just wonder, ‘Who am I?’ ‘What am I?’ ‘How do I live life now?’ It’s all for this baby.

Motherhood has made me a much better person. I see everything from a new perspective – with a sense of wonderment.

I think, in all fields, there’s this motherhood pay penalty where, the second you become a mother – and this is true whether you give birth or adopt – you’re perceived to not be as committed to your job. Whereas men are perceived as breadwinners who now need more money and promotions because they’re fathers.

Motherhood is so sentimentalised and romanticised in our culture. It’s practically against the law to say there are moments in the day when you hate your children. Everyone actually has those moments.

The balancing act of motherhood and a career, and being a wife, is something that I don’t think I’ll ever perfect, but I love the challenge of it.

Motherhood’s a gift denied to so many women who are so deserving of babies, so whenever I feel like I need a good whinge, I remind myself how lucky I am to even be a mum.

I don’t know about changing my perspective, because motherhood is such a glorious blessing and I am very thankful for that. It’s such a beautiful experience. I so strongly recommend it. It’s bliss, love and fulfillment of another level.

The challenge with WWE was keeping up with the schedule and trying to stay healthy and uninjured during that time. Now, with motherhood, the biggest responsibility is trying to protect this little baby and care for her and her needs.

New motherhood is such a vulnerable and powerful time, but it’s also really hard.

The Lord has been there from wanting to be a momma, to having a wonderful childhood life and dreaming of having a good motherhood as a child; always wanting to meet a good old country boy and having someone to love as much as I love my husband Roland and having a little boy that is a mixture of the both of us.

I think motherhood is just about instinct.

My old boyfriend, Warren Beatty, used to say I was a late developer,’ she reflects. ‘He was right. It took me 50 years to find motherhood and unconditional love.’

Morality and its victim, the mother – what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood?

The biggest surprise, which is also the best, is that I didn’t know I would love motherhood as much as I do.

Motherhood is the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

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.

Before motherhood, I had a feeling that unmarried women are the strongest. However, that changed after my son was born.

People expect you to change when you become a mother, and of course my priorities changed when I had Violet. She’s number one in my life and the best thing that ever happened to me, but I still have fun. I am still myself, but that is made out to seem like I am rebelling against motherhood.

I think with motherhood and child-rearing in general, everyone’s going to tell you how to do it and why. I’ve always said to other mothers and women when they’ve asked me, that you have to find your own way and find out what works for your family, at all costs.

I think that in the cultural imagination, motherhood has a primacy that fatherhood just doesn’t; and that’s not to say that there aren’t many fathers who are active and engaged and for whom that is their life’s passion. But somehow, in the imagination, there’s something different about maternity.

Motherhood made me a better person.

Motherhood is a beautiful, wonderful gift… except when it’s not.

My inherent belief is that motherhood is pious, and I am humbled by it.

Motherhood is not what was left over after our Father blessed His sons with priesthood ordination. It was the most ennobling endowment He could give His daughters, a sacred trust that gave women an unparalleled role in helping His children keep their second estate.

Motherhood and marriage are the best bits of my life now. Who would have thought I would be enjoying that?

I had a dozen years to act before starting a family, then found that motherhood dwarfed everything else. Once or twice a year, I take a project that appeals to me for its redeeming social value.

The best thing that could happen to motherhood already has. Fewer women are going into it.

So, I guess motherhood and the threat of not being able to pay my rent inspired me to be a novelist. But as far as what inspired me to be a writer, it’s the stories. It sounds very cliched, but the stories rise up and demand to be told. They always have done, long before I became a writer.

Just think: people decided one day that a day should be set aside for motherhood and fatherhood. What a great concept that is.

Motherhood is a joy! I have dreamed about being a mother since I was 12 years old, and there’s nothing disappointing about it.

There’s so much dishonesty with motherhood in general… The truth is it’s just a lot of embarrassing, humiliating moments.

There is a lot of healing going on. Really! More people are vegetarians, more are in the green movement, more of us are tearing down the old paradigms and embracing same-sex marriage, single motherhood, men raising babies.

I really love doing simple things. I’m surrounded by people all the time at work, so I want to have a normal life when I’m off duty: motherhood, food, and love!

My biggest goal for the future is motherhood.

A lot of women feel like they should be enjoying motherhood, they should be fulfilled and shouldn’t be thinking, ‘I wish I didn’t have to do this.’

Writing something about motherhood, I think that would be pretty cheesy.

The question of peace, progress and prosperity, it’s a motherhood statement, all of us like it.

Whenever I write about motherhood – and I write about it a lot – I am drawing on my experiences as a mother and also my experiences as a daughter.

At 24, I took time off to have a baby, and ever since, I have been juggling modelling with motherhood.

I think birth and motherhood are not things that you’re trained to do. You might have a good example in your own mum, but nobody teaches you how to be a really great mum.

A huge part of keeping women in their place has to do with creating a really limited definition of what a ‘real’ woman is like. And a ton of that what-makes-a-woman nonsense is attached to motherhood. Apparently, by virtue of having ovaries and a uterus, women are automatic mommies or mommies-to-be.

As motherhood is the greatest and most natural God-given gift for women for posterity, it would seem that the birth and rearing of children, in the way which to us seems most ideal, would be the most satisfying and the most rewarding career for a woman.

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

In traditional societies, we have a long legacy of men controlling the body and mind of women. Such societies have valorised motherhood and fabricated concepts like chastity. Women have been the victims of these notions for thousands of years.

Motherhood is something that everyone should experience and I didn’t want to be left behind.

We have always had dogs, so I’ve never known a time in my life where haven’t had a dog. And it is so nice to have something there that is always happy to see you, can always give you love, and is unconditionally loyal. I have always enjoyed having something to take care of, and it prepared me for motherhood.

Motherhood is the most challenging as well as the utmost satisfying vocation in this world.

I always knew my mother loved me, but I also knew just as surely that there were moments, hours, days, when she could hardly cope with her own life, much less motherhood. Often, these episodes came without warning, like a change in weather, and so I became a meteorologist of her dysphoria.

I honestly wondered how on earth I would manage to combine work and motherhood.

I just feel motherhood should be a happy stress-free period for all women.

I feel motherhood is the best phase in every woman’s life.

I love motherhood. I certainly wasn’t aware of any mothering instincts until I had babies. I wasn’t a person who desperately wanted to have kids, but you don’t get it until you do it, and, suddenly, this nurturing instinct exists.

I’m a way bigger worrier than I ever was before I had kids. And, you know, the stress and anxiety that can go along with motherhood, I have had to battle that.

A fierce literary woman with a penchant for married men, Margaret Fuller was ultimately torn between motherhood and her final career as a political reporter.

Work for black women has been an important and valued dimension of Afrocentric definitions of black motherhood.

I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you’ll find a dozen or so who are neither.

There is no theoretical study of motherhood. You know, before I became a mother, I did play a mother, but I was like – I was more thinking of my own mother. I was doing my mother.

I don’t think enough women are being honest about motherhood.

Motherhood definitely took the focus off of my work. And I didn’t mind. I had a few panics when I thought that if I wanted to work I couldn’t get a job anymore and then I would get one once in a while and it would make me feel better.

Conservatives were sure that if you eliminated welfare for single moms, it would eliminate – or at lease greatly reduce – single motherhood. So in 1996 we had welfare reform. Did not change the trend in the least. Soon half of all babies will be born out of wedlock.

I have two young children, and I will say that motherhood is its own peak, just like in the process of writing: one climbs and is continuously moving with each book. Becoming a mother is the greatest connection I’ve ever felt to being spiritual.

Completeness? Happiness? These words don’t come close to describing my emotions. There truly is nothing I can say to capture what motherhood means to me, particularly given my medical history.

There’s a feeling sometimes in motherhood that you’re alone in what you’re going through, and none of us are alone. We’re all going through the same thing.

I wanted to find a way to merge my taste as an art and creative director with my new little obsessions: babies and motherhood and all of that. So I began working on my website, Romy and the Bunnies, which is named after my daughter, Romy.

Motherhood runs its own way and is measured with another watch that, unfortunately, we can’t control.

I stand fearlessly for small dogs, the American Flag, motherhood and the Bible. That’s why people love me.

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

There’s this idea that motherhood is as American as apple pie, but yet we don’t support it with any government assistance.

I didn’t really inhabit myself until I was in my 30s. And motherhood is an epic event. You can’t help but be altered by it – and it is important to be.

Motherhood has been an exercise in guilt.

So much for the myth that motherhood is all Laura Ashley smocks and skipping through fields. People think it’s rose-tinted and they don’t tell the truth!

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.

For most of us, when our ‘dreams’ – I use the word with reservations – came true, and marriage and motherhood became a reality, the romcoms, like horoscopes, swiftly lost their allure.

I want to celebrate and salute motherhood.

Motherhood has become a battleground on which prejudice and class resentment can be waged without ever admitting that’s what we’re doing.

Surrogate motherhood has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the years.

Other than motherhood, the eight years that I spent at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I have incredibly fond memories of. It’s a beautiful place, with four seasons up in Wisconsin. And really wonderful people.

First of all, returning from motherhood, I was looking for something lighter, and I wasn’t as much attracted to Kate as I was to the relationship between the two people.

We may not want to say it out loud, but motherhood is hard.

My mother didn’t find motherhood easy. I’ve heard her saying that. She didn’t breastfeed me. I woke up when I was breastfeeding my own child thinking, ‘How can a woman feel an attachment to a child without breast-feeding?’

Motherhood was the great equaliser for me; I started to identify with everybody.

I love being a mom and having two kids. But I’ve had two C-sections, and I have suffered enough. That’s my favourite mantra when it comes to motherhood.

The noble position of motherhood aside, our general opinion about women is that, while taking into account their specific needs, it should be made possible for them to take on every role, including the jobs of physician, military officer, judge and president of a country.

Motherhood has helped me to stop overanalyzing things. It’s been liberating because I used to be somewhat neurotic. I attribute that to having something bigger than myself.

All those cliches, those things you hear about having a baby and motherhood – all of them are true. And all of them are the most beautiful things you will ever experience.

I happen to find motherhood a very natural state, but I know a lot of other people don’t.

I am not always a hands-on mother, but the feelings of motherhood are the same.

And I think that motherhood has made me a better actress as well.

What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things.

Motherhood is far better than I expected. I love it with all of my heart.

The widespread shame of motherhood is criminal, and it needs to stop. The world can never improve if you disrespect the people that bring life.

I discovered television is a great way to deal with the chaos of new motherhood. I would put the babies to bed and get lost in a trashy reality show.

I do think that despite my best efforts to resist it, I am now a grown-up. It’s due to lots of very difficult decisions that you make over a long period of time – about motherhood, wifehood, and work, and all the things that one has to make decisions about.

The purpose of The Motherhood Manifesto is mothers really need to be given the ability to parent.

This whole motherhood thing has really been, like, back to work from the get-go. It’s sort of a balance.

I quite liked having a baby – I think I won’t put it more strongly than that. But I had no intention of allowing motherhood to disrupt my work as an archeologist.

A woman’s decision to carry a baby to term knowing that she will not reap the fruits of motherhood should be treated as an act of bravery and selflessness – the ultimate standards of good motherhood.

The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.

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.

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?’

I had a different impression of motherhood. I was told it’ll be tough but I realised that eventually it is what you make of it. When you see the love your child gives, giving up a few things doesn’t feel like any sacrifice.

Whether you chose a passive-aggressive husband, workaholic wife, or life of single motherhood, we are all officially allowed – and uniquely qualified – to critique our own life experience. Please don’t pretend you’re living mine.

Motherhood brings you to your knees in a way that doesn’t leave room for you to judge others. It makes you see that there’s no ideal – a constant struggle, constantly compromising, but ultimate love.

Our standards for motherhood are so high that many of us harbor intense, secret guilt for every harsh word we speak to our children, every negative thought that enters our minds.

I lost my mom to breast cancer, and then I lost my father three years later. I thought, ‘What am I waiting for?’ Motherhood has been the greatest gift of my life.

Literature gives us a window into other people’s experiences in other places, in other times, so I thought it would be really interesting to investigate how different people had written about motherhood, and childhood.

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.

My favorite thing about motherhood is the outpouring of love that is non-judgmental and beautiful. My daughter just makes me happy, and she motivates me to be a kid again.

Women have full equality with men before the Lord. By nature, the roles of women differ from those of men. This knowledge has come to us with the Restoration of the gospel in the fullness of times, with an acknowledgment that women are endowed with the great responsibilities of motherhood and nurturing.

I was divorced when my children were young, so I was a single mother for a while. It’s so hard to have to do every little thing yourself and be forced to navigate the rocky emotions of motherhood alone.

Becoming a mother has been the best thing ever for me. It’s become my life’s work. Not just parenting, but sharing information and encouraging other women to be receptive to the basic nature of motherhood.

I feel awful for women who are trying to raise kids on their own, with zero income and no fathers present – that’s single motherhood.

I’ve seen many female comics that a lot of people haven’t heard of who are so funny, and I saw them come up, and they were working so hard, and then all of a sudden they had a baby, and they just got tied up in motherhood, and eventually, they kind of just stopped doing stand-up, and I thought it was such a shame.

In Hindu societies, especially overprotected patriarchal families like mine, daughters are not at all desirable. They are trouble. And a mother who, as mine did, has three daughters, no sons, is supposed to go and hang herself, kill herself, because it is such an unlucky kind of motherhood to have.

Satan has declared war on motherhood. He knows that those who rock the cradle can rock his earthly empire. And he knows that without righteous mothers loving and leading the next generation, the Kingdom of God will fail.

I don’t understand why women journalists always ask women about motherhood? It’s far more important and interesting for women to talk about their work, their thoughts, their creativity and their individual identity.

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.

I didn’t wander into motherhood or nonmotherhood unconsciously, recklessly. I gave it due consideration.

One thing I know for sure – this motherhood thing is not for sissies.

I’ve always tried to control everything and every aspect of my life, and this is maybe the biggest lesson I’ve learnt with motherhood – you just can’t control everything, and I’m much more relaxed now about unexpected changes and things that happen.

Motherhood is the ultimate call to sacrifice.

A lot of women wrote to me. Some wrote me long letters on the meaning of the circle and about mythology and about motherhood and the significance or the symbolism of the mermaid and the frogs and the turtles.

I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won’t be complete women. I don’t think my daughters’ generation has that feeling.

Sonic Youth, for better or worse, is/was a machine that carried me along through pregnancy, motherhood, and creative opportunities I never would have achieved on my own. I’m grateful and surprised that we were listened to, loved, ignored, and overrated.

Motherhood is a dream. It really is absolutely amazing.

I don’t think ‘Motherhood’ is a map for women. I would never say that it’s a template for every woman in response to her biology.

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.

Motherhood may be a ‘killer’ when it comes to becoming a Master of the Universe, but among middle-class mothers, even after that touch of baby’s lips to bosom, a big and growing number find themselves able – and often required – to bring home the family bacon.

I am a perfect case study for the transition from no maternal instinct to the love of motherhood.

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.

I just love motherhood.

Motherhood hasn’t changed me much but the only difference I feel is that I have become more patient.

One of the things that I share with most of the women in my circle is the gift of motherhood.

You know, motherhood is my favourite topic in my personal life and I won’t shut up about it, but it’s not something I want to discuss publicly just because of the amount of attention it draws to a small person who didn’t choose to be exposed.

I think that Sappho expresses the orphaned part of ourselves. The orphaned part of ourselves that reaches out to passion for completion. That reaches out to motherhood for completion.

I have no maternal instinct whatsoever. Motherhood holds no interest for me.

Is there nothing the prodigiously talented Ann Patchett can’t do? She’s channeled the world of opera, Boston politics, magic, unwed motherhood, and race relations, creating scenarios so indelible, you swear they are right outside your door.

A miracle is really the only way to describe motherhood and giving birth. It’s unbelievable how God has made us women and babies to endure and be able to do so much. A miracle, indeed. Such an incredible blessing.

Motherhood is filled with magical little moments that bring you immense joy.

Motherhood is the only thing in my life that I’ve really known for sure is something I wanted to do.

I love babies. I also have this very deep desire to become a mother. I always thought that motherhood was my highest calling.

I’m somebody who, if I went to the grocery store, and one of them wasn’t with me, I would feel guilty. I would be like, ‘I shouldn’t be doing anything without them, anytime, ever.’ A very codependent way of thinking. Also, motherhood is hugely about guilt.

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.

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.

Motherhood to me is something that I always wanted, but never quite knew how it was going to happen.

Motherhood was the first instance in my life where I was asked to sacrifice anything for anyone.

Passion has always been important to me. That won’t change. What changes in a woman’s perspective. I mean, I have two kids now. I’m a single parent balancing motherhood and my career. That changes the equation.

I have made a choice to fully enjoy my kids and this particular season of my life. It’s a very conscious, powerful decision. In some ways, it takes more guts to buck the financial rewards and adulation that come from a professional career to pursue something so culturally undervalued as at-home motherhood.

Of course a woman who decides to work full time as a mother in the home can be happy and deserves full respect from us. Motherhood is one of the most challenging and creative jobs anyone can do. The goal is to remake the world so that our choices are not so stark.

Motherhood is the greatest thing and the hardest thing.

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.

Beguiling voices in the world cry out for ‘alternative lifestyles’ for women. They maintain that some women are better suited for careers than for marriage and motherhood.

So much of my own life inspires what I write. Whether it’s work, family, friends, motherhood, I am a writer who tends to write what she knows. In ‘Revenge Wears Prada,’ a great deal of my own life finds its way into the book.

Motherhood changed me because it is so fundamental what you’re doing for another person. And you are able to do even though it takes a lot.

And (cue music swell) motherhood turned out to be the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done with my life. Really.

I never really wanted kids. I didn’t not want them, but motherhood just wasn’t something that pulled at me.

Positive thinking is so firmly enshrined in our culture that knocking it is a little like attacking motherhood or apple pie.

In many ways, being pregnant and working were more difficult than motherhood.

For a while, I was feeling so creative in motherhood that I had no longing to work. I felt that my children needed me, that I couldn’t leave them for a second.