Happy Mother's Day!

In honor of the occasion, here are some of my favorite quotes on the subject of motherhood. Any other favorites out there?

"Making the decision to have a child--it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body." Elizabeth Stone

"Of all the rights of women, the greatest is to be a mother." Lin Yutang

"The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness." Honore' de Balzac

"Mother's arms are made of tenderness, and sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein." Victor Hugo

"Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of little children." William Makepeace Thackeray

"When God thought of Mother, He must have laughed with satisfaction and framed it quickly--so rich, so deep, so divine, so full of soul, power, and beauty was the conception." Henry Ward Beecher

"Stories first heard at a mother's knee are never wholly forgotten--a little spring that never quite dries up in our journey through scorching years." Giovanni Ruffini

"My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am am I owe to my mother. I attribute all my successes in life to the moral, intellectual, and physical education I received from her." George Washington

"Men are what their mothers made them." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his." Oscar Wilde

"The trouble with being a parent is that by the time you are experienced, you are unemployed." Rosemary Coleton

"No one will ever engrave 'She kept a tidy house' on a mother's tombstone." Susan Causdale

"I looked on childrearing not only as a work of love and duty, but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world, and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it." Rose Kennedy

"A man loves his sweetheart the best, his wife the most, but his mother the longest." Irish proverb