I’ve already posted several items about my mother (or reposted previous years’ thoughts about her), so I won’t do that yet again. Instead, here are several quotations about mothers. You can make the appropriate applications to your own mother.
Martin Luther: “When Eve was brought unto Adam, he . . . gave her the most sanctified, the most glorious of appellations. He called her Eve, that is to say, the Mother of All. He did not style her wife, but simply mother, mother of all living creatures. In this consists the glory and the most precious ornament of woman.”
Sidney Harris: “The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes one a mother–which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.”
George Washington: “All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute my success in life to the moral, intellectual, and physical education I received from her.”
Emily Dickinson: “A mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.”
Sue Skeen: “A mother is that someone / With a mission from above / Imparting to her children / The image of God’s love.”
William Cowper (whose mother died when he was only six years old): “Not a week passes (perhaps I might with equal veracity say a day) in which I do not think of her. Such was the impression her tenderness made upon me, though the opportunity she had for showing it was so short.”
William Dean Howells: “A man never sees all that his mother has been to him until it’s too late to let her know that he sees it.”
I can especially relate to the last two quotations. Although I was an adult when my mother died, I still think of her practically every day, often longing for the advice and counsel she might have given me in the various circumstances of my life. The statement by Howells, while too often true, need not be so. Those of you who have your mothers still living should tell them how much you love and appreciate them while they are still with you. I no longer can do that, but how often I have wished that I could.
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