135 Mother’s Day Quotes to Brighten Her Day (2025)

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Short Mother’s Day quotes

1. “There is nothing as sincere as a mother’s kiss.” —Saleem Sharma

2. “We are born of love; love is our mother.” —Rumi

3. “A mother’s love is more beautiful than any fresh flower.” —Debasish Mridha

4. “Motherhood: All love begins and ends there.” —Robert Browning

5. “An ounce of mother is worth a ton of priest.” —Spanish proverb

6. “The best place to cry is on a mother’s arms.” —Jodi Picoult

7. “All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.” —Abraham Lincoln

8. “Sons are the anchors of a mother’s life.” —Sophocles

9. “My mother is a walking miracle.” —Leonardo DiCaprio

10. “I can imagine no heroism greater than motherhood.” —Lance Conrad

11. “Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.” —Barbara Kingsolver

12. “Mothers possess a power beyond that of a king on his throne.” —Mabel Hale

13. “A mother’s arms are more comforting than anyone else’s.” —Princess Diana

14. “Men are what their mothers made them.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

15. “As is the mother, so is her daughter.” —Ezekiel 16:4

16. “Of all the rights of women, the greatest is to be a mother.” —Lin Yutang

17. “The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom.” —Henry Ward Beecher

18. “A mother is a mother still, the holiest thing alive.”—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

19. “Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.” —George Eliot

20. “I really learned it all from mothers.” —Benjamin Spock

21. “Mothers can look through a child’s eyes and see tomorrow.”—Reed Markham

22. “A mother understands what a child does not say.”—Jewish proverb

23. “The world needs our mothers.”—Liya Kebede

24. “There is no influence so powerful as that of the mother.”—Sara Josepha Hale

25. “Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.”—William Makepeace Thackeray

26. Mother’s are the necessity of invention.” —Plato

27. “Motherhood is the greatest thing and the hardest thing.” —Ricki Lake

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Heart-touching Mother’s Day quotes

28. “Mother is the heartbeat in the home; and without her, there seems to be no heartthrob.” —Leroy Brownlow

29. “My Mother: She is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.” —Jodi Picoult

30. “Mothers hold their children’s hands for a short while, but their hearts forever.” —Unknown

31. “A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.” —Tenneva Jordan

32. “[My mother] always said I was beautiful, and I finally believed her at some point.” —Lupita Nyong’o

33. “If I’ve learned anything as a mom with a daughter who’s 3, I’ve learned that you cannot judge the way another person is raising their kid. Everybody is just doing the best they can. It’s hard to be a mom.” —Maggie Gyllenhaal

34. “I would say that my mother is the single biggest role model in my life, but that term doesn’t seem to encompass enough when I use it about her. She was the love of my life.” —Mindy Kaling

35. “Blessed is a mother that would give up part of her soul for her children’s happiness.” —Shannon Alder

36. “Mothers were meant to love us unconditionally, to understand our moments of stupidity, to reprimand us for lame excuses while yet acknowledging our point of view, to weep over our pain and failures as well as cry at our joy and successes and to cheer us on despite countless start-overs. Heaven knows, no one else will.” —Richelle Goodrich

37. “A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dates all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.” —Agatha Christie

38. “There’s no way to be a perfect mother and a million ways to be a good one.” —Jill Churchill

39. “There is an enduring tenderness in the love of a mother to a son that transcends all other affections of the heart.” —Washington Irving

40. “No language can express the power and beauty and heroism of a mother’s love.” —Edwin Hubbel Chapin

41. “Mothers are the people who love us for no good reason. And those of us who are mothers know it’s the most exquisite love of all.” —Maggie Gallagher

42. “There are no perfect parents, and there are no perfect children, but there are plenty of perfect moments along the way.” —Dave Willis

43. “Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together.” —Pearl S. Buck

44. “My children are the reason I laugh, smile and want to get up every morning.” —Gena Lee Nolin Read

45. “No man succeeds without a good woman behind him. Wife or mother, if it is both, he is twice blessed indeed.” —Godfrey Winn

46. “Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.” —Erich Fromm

47. “God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.” —Rudyard Kipling

48. “A mother is she who can take the place of all others but whose place no one else can take.” —Cardinal Mermillod

49. “A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make learning unnecessary.” —Dorothy Canfield Fisher

50. ” The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.” —Theodore Hesburgh

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Inspiring Mother’s Day quotes

51. “Being a mother is learning about strengths you didn’t know you had.” —Linda Wooten

52. “There is no role in life that is more essential than that of motherhood.” —Elder M. Russell Ballard

53. “The influence of a mother in the lives of her children is beyond calculation.” —James E. Faust

54. “Motherhood is the exquisite inconvenience of being another person’s everything.” —Unknown

55. “I remember my mother’s prayers, and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.” —Abraham Lincoln

56. “Acceptance, tolerance, bravery, compassion. These are the things my mom taught me.” —Lady Gaga

57. “My mother is my root, my foundation. She planted the seed that I base my life on, and that is the belief that the ability to achieve starts in your mind.” —Michael Jordan

58. “My mom is my hero. [She] inspired me to dream when I was a kid, so anytime anyone inspires you to dream, that’s gotta be your hero.” —Tim McGraw

59. “[Motherhood is] the biggest gamble in the world. It is the glorious life force. It’s huge and scary—it’s an act of infinite optimism.” —Gilda Radner

60. “My mother always said ‘Don’t bother other people.’ I think that’s good advice.” —Amy Sedaris

61. “They are not kidding when they say that mothers are strong women. We need to be strong in more ways than our children will ever know.” —M.B. Antevasin

62. “A good mother loves fiercely but ultimately brings up her children to thrive without her.” —Erin Kelly

63. “Clarity and focus doesn’t always come from God or inspirational quotes. Usually, it takes your mother to slap the reality back into you.” —Shannon Alder

64. “That’s the wonderful thing about mothers: You can because you must, and you just do.” —Kate Winslet

65. “My mother sacrificed her dreams so I could dream.” —Rupi Kaur

66. “A mother’s love doesn’t make her son more dependent and timid; it actually makes him stronger and more independent.” —Cheri Fuller

67. “There will be many times you will feel like you have failed. But in the eyes, heart and mind of your child, you are supermom.” —Stephanie Precourt

68. “I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.” —E.M. Forster

69. “Most mothers are instinctive philosophers.” —Harriet Beecher Stowe

70. “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.” —William Ross Wallace

71. “Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother.” —Oprah Winfrey

72. “I think, as mothers, we are all just trying our best.” —Gisele Bündchen

73. “Live so that when your children think of fairness, caring and integrity, they think of you.” —H. Jackson Brown Jr.

74. “When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.” —Sophia Loren

75. “Being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation.” —Robert A. Heinlein

76. “I believe the choice to become a mother is the choice to become one of the greatest spiritual teachers there is.” —Oprah Winfrey

77. “A mother’s love is the fuel that enables a human being to do the impossible.” —Marion C. Garretty

78. “The art of mothering is to teach the art of living to children.” —Elaine Heffner

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Cute Mother’s Day quotes

79. “Mother—that was the bank where we deposited all our hurts and worries.” —T. Dewitt Talmage

80. “To a child’s ear, ‘mother’ is magic in any language.” —Arlene Benedict

81. “It may be possible to gild pure gold, but who can make his mother more beautiful?” —Mahatma Gandhi

82. “Mama was my greatest teacher, a teacher of compassion, love and fearlessness. If love is sweet as a flower, then my mother is that sweet flower of love.” —Stevie Wonder

83. “My mother has always been my emotional barometer and my guidance. I was lucky enough to get to have one woman who truly helped me through everything.” —Emma Stone

84. “My mother had a slender, small body, but a large heart—a heart so large that everybody’s joys found welcome in it, and hospitable accommodation.” —Mark Twain

85. “But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begins.” —Mitch Albom

86. “My mother was my role model before I even knew what that word was.” —Lisa Leslie

87. “I can only hope to be 10% of the mom mine was to me.” —Charlize Theron

88. “Mothers are like glue. Even when you can’t see them, they’re still holding the family together.” —Susan Gale

89. “To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow.” —Maya Angelou

90. “Moms are as relentless as the tides. They just don’t drive us to practice; they drive us to greatness.” —Steve Rushin

91. “Every beetle is a gazelle in the eyes of its mother.” —Moroccan proverb

92. “There is nothing in the world of art like the songs mother used to sing.” —Billy Sunday

93. “We never know the love of a parent till we become parents ourselves.” —Henry Ward Beecher

94. “Throughout my life, my mom has been the person that I’ve always looked up to.” —Mike Krzyzewski

95. “[A] mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.” —Emily Dickinson

96. “Motherhood is heart-exploding, blissful hysteria.” —Olivia Wilde

97. “She never quite leaves her children at home, even when she doesn’t take them along.” —Margaret Culkin Banning

98. “A mother is the truest friend we have when trials, heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity.” —Washington Irving

99. “A mother’s arms are made of tenderness, and children sleep soundly in them.” —Victor Hugo

100. “Youth fades, love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother’s secret hope outlives them all.” —Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

101. “Hugs can do great amounts of good—especially for children.” —Princess Diana

102. “There is no velvet so soft as a mother’s lap.” —Jean Paul

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Funny Mother’s Day quotes

103. “It’s not easy being a mother. If it were, fathers would do it.” —The Golden Girls

104. “The phrase ’working mother’ is redundant.” —Jane Sellman

105. “If evolution really works, how come mothers have only two hands?” —Milton Berle

106. “There is only one pretty child in the world, and every mother has it.” —Chinese proverb

107. “Mom, I love you, even though I’ll never accept your friend request.” —Unknown

108. “I want my children to have all the things I couldn’t afford. Then, I want to move in with them.” —Phyllis Diller

109. “Being a mom has made me so tired. And so happy.” —Tina Fey

110. “Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.” —Marguerite Duras

111. “My mother’s menu consists of two choices: Take it or leave it.” —Buddy Hackett

112. “I do what I want, when I want, where I want … if my mom says it’s OK.” —Unknown

113. “When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.” —Nora Ephron

114. “If at first you don’t succeed, try doing it the way your mom told you to do it from the start.” —Unknown

115. “Mothers are all slightly insane.” —J.D. Salinger

116. “A mother takes 20 years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in 20 minutes.” —Robert Frost

117. “Don’t forget Mother’s Day. Or as they call it in Beverly Hills, Dad’s Third Wife Day.” —Jay Leno

118. “I always brought up my children not to believe in Mother’s Day gifts, and now I regret it.” —Lauren Bacall

119. “Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children.” —Sam Levenson

120. “My dear Mama, you are definitely the hen who hatched a famous duck.” —Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

121. “I hope my tongue in prune juice smothers, If I belittle dogs and mothers.” —Ogden Nash

122. “Any mother could perform the jobs of several air-traffic controllers with ease.” —Lisa Alther

123. “Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.” —Ambrose Bierce

124. “I’m amazed when I see mothers wearing high heels. If your kids run off, you can’t run after them.” —Claudia Schiffer

125. “A suburban mother’s role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.” —Peter De Vries

126 “You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.” —Franklin P. Adams

127. “I can cook, but not well. I figure I have six years until my children discover what their friends’ mothers make for dinner.” —Jane Pauley

128. “When you feel neglected, think of the female salmon, who lays 3,000,000 eggs but no one remembers her on Mother’s Day.” —Sam Ewing

129. “Children should have enough freedom to be themselves—once they’ve learned the rules.” —Anna Quindlen

130. “If you’ve never been hated by your child, you’ve never been a parent.” —Bette Davis

131. “When your mother asks, ‘Do you want a piece of advice?’ it is a mere formality. It doesn’t matter if you answer yes or no. You’re going to get it anyway.” —Erma Bombeck

132. “A perfect parent is a person with excellent child-rearing theories and no actual children.” —Dave Barry

133. “When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. When they’re finished, I climb out.” —Erma Bombeck

134. “Mama does everything for the baby, who responds by saying ‘Da-da’ first.” –Mignon McLaughlin

135. “My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.” —Mark Twain

Loving these Mother’s Day quotes and need something else to pull at your mom’s heartstrings? Have her read these sweet stories about motherhood.

Additional reporting by Emma Taubenfeld and Lindsay Tigar.

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