Mother Defined Quotes & Sayings

We have to steer our true life's course. Whatever your calling is in life! The whole purpose of being here is to figure out what that is as soon as possible, so you go about the business of being on track, of not being owned by what your mother said, what society said, whatever people think a woman is supposed to be when you can exceed other people's expectations and be defined by your own! — Oprah Winfrey

99 per cent of your life recognises things without definition, a baby recognises its mother's face without having it defined. It's just an arbitrary rule this rule of definition that Socrates set down. — Robert M. Pirsig

There is a danger in the repudiation of the feminine when the daughter who rejects the aspects of the negative feminine embodied by her mother also denies positive aspects of her own feminine nature, which are playful, sensuous, passionate, nurturing, intuitive, and creative. Many women who have had angry or emotional mothers seek to control their own anger and feelings lest they be seen as destructive and castrating. This repression of anger often prevents them from seeing the inequities in a male-defined system. Women who have seen their mothers as superstitious, religious, or old-fashioned discard the murky, mysterious, magical aspects of the feminine for cool logic and analysis. A chasm is created between the heroine and the maternal qualities within her; this chasm will have to be healed later in the journey for her to achieve wholeness. — Maureen Murdock

The bond between mothers and their children is one defined by love. As a mother's prayers for her children are unending, so are the wisdom, grace, and strength they provide to their children. — George W. Bush

In life, purpose is defined by the thing that makes you angry. Martin Luther was angry; Mandela was angry; Mahatma Gandhi was angry; Mother Teresa was angry. If you are not angry, you do not have a ministry yet. — Myles Munroe

Family comes in many shapes and forms. It's a single mom that happily gives up the things she wants or needs in order to provide that extra special something for her child. It's the single father that's trying to be a mother and father to his kids. It's the parents that were never able to have children of their own and adopt a child. Family doesn't show prejudice based on race, age or sex. Family isn't only defined by blood; it's defined by love. Something that Lily and I have in leaps and bounds. Family's what we make it, what we want it to be. — Jennifer Miller

And yet. And yet. If asked - if pressed - Honora would have to say she is strangely content. It's an odd feeling that she cannot describe to anyone - not to her mother and certainly not to Sexton, whose unhappiness seems to have no bounds, whose unhappiness is defined now by what he does not have, which is almost everything. He will always, in his mind, be the salesman who no longer has anything to sell. A man who longs for the open road but who cannot ever take it. Whereas Honora, oddly, now has more purpose than she ever did before. She is a dutiful wife who tends to her husband in spite of his weaknesses. She is a woman with ingenuity. She is a woman without illusions. She is a woman who, above all, is too busy trying to make a go of it to fret about her marriage. — Anita Shreve

My mother and grandmother ... they were my first muses. The way they dressed and carried themselves was an education in elegance. They defined the word. — Christian Cota

Current conflicts and guilt about being a woman who is a mother and a person in her own right are a socially defined malaise, notan individual problem ... The conflict is not between being a mother and having a career; it is between nineteenth-century ideas about children and today's ideas about women. — Sandra Scarr

If my mother's intention in whole or in part was to ensure that I never had to suffer any indignity or embarrassment for being a Jew, then she succeeded well enough. And in any case there were enough intermarriages and 'conversions' on both sides of her line to make me one of those many mischling hybrids who are to be found distributed all over the known world. And, as someone who doesn't really believe that the human species is subdivided by 'race,' let alone that a nation or nationality can be defined by its religion, why should I not let the whole question slide away from me? Why - and then I'll stop asking rhetorical questions - did I at some point resolve that, in whatever tone of voice I was asked 'Are you a Jew?' I would never hear myself deny it? — Christopher Hitchens

We should no longer allow a mother to be defined as "just a mom". It is on her back that great nations are built. We should no longer allow any woman's voice to be drowned out or disregarded. As we affirm other women, and as we teach our sons, husbands and friends to hold them in the highest regard, we honor both the mothers whose shoulders we've stood on and the daughters who will one day stand tall on ours. — Oprah Winfrey

Well, write poetry, for God's sake, it's the only thing that matters. — E. E. Cummings

My mother and father instilled in me a sense of purpose not defined by today's street obsession with bling, cars or cribs. — Brian J. White

What has been valued in the West in women has too often been defined only in relation to the masculine: the good, nurturant mother and wife; the sweet, docile agreeable daughter; the gently supportive of bright achieving partner. This collective model is inadequate for life; we mutilate, depotentiate, silence and enrage ourselves trying to compress our souls into it just as surely as our grandmothers deformed their fully breathing bodies with corsets for the sake of an ideal. — Sylvia Brinton Perera

Hard work, is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man- and of woman. — Richard Yates

No one teaches you how to walk away from someone who you know loves you. NO one teaches you how to say good-bye. — Ellen Hopkins

Looking at those photographs, I remembered how my parents had never said "I love you" to each other. How they had said only "I miss you." At the time, I hadn't been able to figure out what this meant. But now it seemed clear: this was how they defined their love - by how deeply they missed each other when they were together. They felt the loss before it happened, and their love was defined by that loss. They hungered even as they ate, thirsted even as they drank. My mother once told me to live my life as if I were already dead. "Live each day as if you know it's gonna be gone tomorrow," she had said. That was how my parents loved each other, with a desperate, melancholy love, a fierce nostalgia for the present. — Danzy Senna

I don't think my mother and father ever had any doubts about what I was to be punished for or not. My parents come from a very strictly defined culture. — B.F. Skinner

I was determined to be both pretty and fierce, as Mother had said I could be. Just because I was interested in a man's job didn't mean I had to give up being girly. Who defined those roles anyhow? "Truly, — Kerri Maniscalco

If you take my entire golfing life, my favorites are the older courses, the more traditional and the more authentic. — Trent Dilfer

The central concern of Egyptian art, literature, and architecture was the divine world order
the pharaoh and the gods, who were essentially one and the same. To the Egyptians, that divine order was eternal and unchanging, but it did not rest on a coherent and defined system of belief. The same god might be seen one time as the sky, another time as a bird; he might have a mythical mother, yet it might be said that he gave birth to himself; the sky could be both a cow and a goddess. The Egyptians did not think in chronological or logical terms but pictured the same phenomenon in a number of different ways. — Norman F. Cantor

She liked time at the edges of things
the edge of the crowd, the edge of the pool, the edge of the wood
where all must pass but none quite belonged. — Nicola Griffith

I know being on a major label is meant to be antiquated, but we're fine with it. — Chris Martin

A mother isn't the person who births you; it's the person who rears you and shows you love. — Raquel Cepeda

The basis of everything that I plugged into when I was younger was blues, and it always stayed with me. — Eric Burdon

Fear cannot touch me ...
It can only taunt me,
It cannot take me,
Just tell me where to go ...
I can either follow,
Or stay in my bed ...
I can hold on
To the things that I know ...
The dead stay dead,
They cannot walk.
The shadows are darkness.
And darkness cannot talk — Christopher Rice

I never wanted it to get to this point. I had hoped that, by its own course, by the way the media covers politics, people would open their eyes and see who Donald Trump really is. But that, unfortunately, has not happened. The polls in the early states indicate that he's been able to fool a significant number of people into believing that he is something that he is not. — Marco Rubio

In these troubled, uncertain times, we don't need more command and control; we need better means to engage everyone's intelligence in solving challenges and crises as they arise. — Margaret J. Wheatley

But most important, I see me . . . or rather, the me I've become. Because I can finally see that all the terrible parts of my life, the embarrassing parts, the incidents I wanted to pretend never happened, and the things that make me "weird" and "different," were actually the most important parts of my life. They were the parts that made me me. And this was the very reason I decided to tell this story . . . to celebrate the strange, to give thanks for the bizarre, and to one day help my daughter understand that the reason her mother appeared mostly naked on Fox News (that's in book two, sorry) is probably the same reason her grandfather occasionally brings his pet donkey into bars: Because you are defined not by life's imperfect moments, but by your reaction to them. Because there is joy in embracing - rather than running screaming from - the utter absurdity of life. And because it's illegal to leave an unattended donkey in your car, even if you do live in Texas. — Anonymous

Your identity should not be fully defined by what you do, by being a manager, a wife, a mother of children or a computer programmer — Sunday Adelaja

Words are not in the power of men; men are in the power of words. Every time we open our mouths, a thousand dead men speak through us. — Hermann Bahr

The Tudors") "I walked away thinking, well, if I don't get the job, it doesn't matter - I've kissed Jonathan Rhys Meyers! — Natalie Dormer

A woman without a man
a condition of 'manlessness'
is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife. — Barbara Kingsolver

In 1975, stay-at-home mothers spent an average of about eleven hours per week on primary child care (defined as routine caregiving and activities that foster a child's well-being, such as reading and fully focused play). Mothers employed outside the home in 1975 spent six hours doing these activities. Today, stay-at-home mothers spend about seventeen hours per week on primary child care, on average, while mothers who work outside the home spend about eleven hours. This means that an employed mother today spends about the same amount of time on primary child care activities as a nonemployed mother did in 1975. — Sheryl Sandberg

Bruce, we've been defined by our pasts. Everyone is, but I just think some souls can take more than others. It's not their fault if they can't.'

I thought of my mother and couldn't have agreed more - and couldn't have loved Jenn more for saying it. — Jake Remington