This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Experience is the mother of knowledge." - English Proverbs
"One good mother is worth a hundred school masters." - George Herbert
"A bad memory is the mother of invention." - Gerald Brenan, fully Edward FitzGerald "Gerald" Brenan
"Who takes the child by the hand takes the mother by the heart." - German Proverbs
"It’s clear that most American children suffer too much mother and too little father." - Gloria Steinem
"Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father." - Gloria Steinem
"At first babes feed on their mother’s bosom, but always on her heart." - Henry Ward Beecher
"The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Experience is the mother of custom." - Henry Ward Beecher
"God pardons like a mother who kisses the offence into everlasting forgetfulness." - Henry Ward Beecher
"What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin." - Henry Ward Beecher
"What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way to the coffin." - Henry Ward Beecher
"The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken in the hearing of little children tends toward the formation of character. Let parents always bear this in mind." - Hosea Ballou
"Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within the hearing of little children tends towards the formation of character." - Hosea Ballou
"To the mother alone it has been given, that her soul during the nine months should touch the soul of the child, and impose upon it predispositions to truth, gentleness, goodness, the culture of which precious germs she should complete in the light of day, after having sown them in the mysterious mysteries of her maternity." - Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
"Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards against improbity. It keeps the judge himself, while trying, under trial. Under the auspices of publicity, the cause in the court of law, and the appeal to the court of public opinion, are going on at the same time... It is through publicity alone that justice becomes the mother of security." - Jeremy Bentham
"A mystic sees beyond the illusion of separateness into the intricate web of life in which all things are expressions of a single Whole. You can call this web God, the Tao, the Great Spirit, the Infinite Mystery, Mother or Father, but it can be known only as love." - Joan Borysenko
"An ounce of mother wit is worth a pound of clergy." - John Adams
"Ignorance is the mother of prejudice." - John Bright
"When brain and heart frequencies entrain, they enter a synchronous, resonant, or coherent wave pattern. Though rare in adults, such entrainment is critical to full development of our human nature… The same entrainment of heart frequencies occurs between mother and infant during breast-feeding and other close body contact." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"Remember to think of your departed mother always as living, just away in another room of our Father’s house." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"The future destiny of a child is always the work of the mother." - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I
"Death is the mother of forms." - Octavio Paz, born Octavio Paz Lozano
"Necessity! thou mother of the world." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"If you are wise, all men will be your friends and kindred, for you will be useful and good; but if you are not wise, neither father, nor mother, nor kindred; nor any one else, will be your friends." - Plato NULL
"The true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention." - Plato NULL
"Laughing at his own son, who got his mother, and by his mother's means his father also, to indulge him, he told him that he had the most power of any one in Greece: "For the Athenians command the rest of Greece, I command the Athenians, your mother commands me, and you command your mother."" - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Beware of covetousness, which is a malady, diseaseful, incurable. Intimacy with it is impossible, it makes the sweet friend bitter, it alienates the trusted one from his master, it makes father and mother mad… it divorces a man’s wife." - Ptah-hotep, aka Ptahhotpe or Ptah-Hotep NULL
"There never was child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him asleep." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Employment, which Galen calls "Nature's physician," is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery." - Robert Burton
"Life was a lot simpler when what we honored was father and mother rather than all major credit cards." - Robert Orben
"Discretion is the mother of virtue." - Saint Benedict of Nursia NULL
"Leisure and solitude are the best effect of riches, because mother of thought. Both are avoided by most rich men, who seek company and business, which are signs of being weary of themselves." - William Temple, fully Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet
"Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life." - Sophocles NULL
"A child tells in the street what its father and mother say at home." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL
"Security is the mother of danger and the grandmother of destruction." - Thomas Fuller
"Ignorance is the mother of suspicion." - William Rounseville Alger
"A guilty conscience is the mother of invention. " - Carolyn Wells
"Expel avarice, the mother of all wickedness, who, always thirst for more, opens wide her jaws for gold." - Claudian, latin Claudius Claudianus NULL
"The potential space between baby and mother, between child and family, between individual and society or the world, depends on experience which loeads to trust. It can be looked upon as sacred to the individual in that it is here that the individual experiences creative living." - D. W. Winicott, fully Donald Woods Winnicott
"A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary." - Dorothy Canfield Fisher
"My mother used to say, "He who angers you, conquers you!" But my mother was a saint." - Elizabeth Kenny
"In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child’s separation." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"By incestuous symbiosis is meant the tendency to stay tied to the mother and to her equivalents — blood, family, tribe — to fly from the unbearable weight of responsibility, of freedom, of awareness, and to be protected and loved in a state of certainty dependence that the individual pays for with the ceasing of his own human development." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"It is a fundamental truth that the responsibilities of motherhood cannot be successfully delegated. No, not to day-care centers, not to schools, not to nurseries, not to babysitters. We become enamored with men’s theories such as the idea of preschool training outside the home for young children. Not only does this put added pressure on the budget, but it places young children in an environment away from mother’s influence. Too often the pressure for popularity, on children and teens, places an economic burden on the income of the father, so mother feels she must go to work to satisfy her children’s needs. That decision can be most shortsighted. It is mother’s influence during the crucial formative years that forms a child’s basic character. Home is the place where a child learns faith, feels love, and thereby learns from mother’s loving example to choose righteousness. How vital are mother’s influence and teaching in the home—and how apparent when neglected!" - Ezra Taft Benson
"Ignorance is the mother of all evils. " - François Rabelais
"Necessity [is] the mother of invention." - George Farquhar