"Great Mother" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... premises in the past to an inevitable conclusion in the future. But if it be regarded from a less elevated, though more human, point of view; if our moral sympathies are allowed to influence our judgment, and we permit ourselves to criticise our great mother as we criticise one another; then our verdict, at least so far as sentient nature is concerned, can hardly ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... said I. "The poets will tell you. All you have to do is to lie on the breast of the Great Mother and your heartache will go from you. I've never tried it myself, as I've never ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... tale. It threatened with its spires as cruel as bared fangs, and yet it beckoned and invited with its blue distances. Always, since the first man fashioned the first club and made him a knife of a jagged flint, has mankind battled with the great mother, the earth who bore him. He has striven with her for his food, warred with her for his raiment, entrenched himself against the merciless attack of the seasons, winter to stab him with icy spear, summer to consume him. And always has he loved her and honoured her, since she is his great mother. ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... moon being the chief objects of veneration to the most ancient ancestors of the Chinese, they translated the soul of their great father heaven or the first man (Shang-te) to the sun, and the soul of their great mother earth or the first woman (the female half of the first man) to the moon." [170] In Taoism there is no room for question. Dr. Legge says that it had its Chang and Liu, and "many more gods, supreme gods, celestial gods, great gods, and divine rulers." [171] And Dr. Edkins ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... highly, while appearing to restrict it, Schiller had joyfully embraced: it unfolded the extraordinary qualities which Nature had implanted in him; and in the lively feeling of freedom and self-direction, he showed himself unthankful to the Great Mother, who surely had not acted like a step-dame towards him. Instead of viewing her as self-subsisting, as producing with a living force, and according to appointed laws, alike the highest and the lowest of her works, he took ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... contrasts most strikingly with the exuberant polytheism of the Chaldean one, in which Heaven, Sun, Storm, Sea, even Rain are personified, deified, and consistently act their several appropriate and most dramatic parts in the great cataclysm, while Nature herself, as the Great Mother of beings and fosterer of life, is represented, in the person of Ishtar, lamenting the slaughter of men (see p. 327). Apart from this fundamental difference in spirit, the identity in all the essential points of fact is amazing, and variations ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... have a lodging for which no mortal is called on to pay—the great mother-earth," said the old man, "and I am glad, glad to escape from this money-governed world. Do not smile so blandly on me, both of you, and attend me with such false tenderness. There, take it away," he said, as Mrs. Lawson was placing her most comfortable footstool under his feet; "there ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... Tayoga, to Robert, "first to Manitou, who has kept us alive, next to our great mother, the Earth, who has produced the food that we eat and who sends forth the water that we drink, and last to the Sun, who ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... petal, Margaret had watched the rose of her youth fading and falling. More than all her sisters, she was endowed with a zest for existence. Her superb physical constitution cried out for the joy of life. She was made to be a great lover, a great mother; and to her, more than most, the sunshine falling in muffled beams through the lattices of her mother's sick-room came with a maddening summons to—live. She was so supremely fitted to play a triumphant part in the world outside there, so gay of ...
— Different Girls • Various
... organic one, a tie of blood from within, not a force from without—in one word, the recognition of the great principle of national freedom which, when the nation is sufficiently developed and self-disciplined to be fit for it, is the great mother of progress. Sown in the corruption of those mangled and decaying corpses on many an awful battle-field, freedom is raised to the glory of an ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... of danger we have seen all these members of the great Mother Country rush to its help. The spectacle has been an inspiring one, and in the case of South Africa especially it has been unique, inasmuch as it has been predicted far and wide that the memory of the Boer War would never die out, and that loyalty to Great Britain would never ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... a list of great mothers, do not leave out Helvia, mother of three sons and a daughter who made their mark upon the times. It is no small thing to be a great mother! ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... under lowering brows. The sight of her like that—head thrown back, eyes glittering, cheeks scarlet, and lips curled—was like a lash upon his manhood. The answer was plain enough, but an instinct from the great mother herself bade him disregard it. Suddenly his eyes ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... Rome, in order that he might not witness the return of Metellus from exile, a measure which he had been unable to prevent. He set sail for Cappadocia and Galatia under the pretense of offering sacrifices which he had vowed to the Great Mother. He had, however, a deeper purpose in visiting these countries. Finding that he was losing his popularity while the Republic was at peace, he was anxious to recover his lost ground by gaining fresh victories in war, and accordingly repaired to the court of Mithridates, ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... batrachians to come out of the gritty waysides, and swarm along our highways and by-ways, leading ignorant and thoughtless people to suppose that they have rained down from the sky. The simple fact is, that the earth was commanded to bring them forth, and that great mother of all vegetable and animal life is obeying the command to-day, just as she did ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... the Rights of Man engendered the Society of Action. These were impatient individuals who broke away and hastened ahead. Other associations sought to recruit themselves from the great mother societies. The members of sections complained that they were torn asunder. Thus, the Gallic Society, and the committee of organization of the Municipalities. Thus the associations for the liberty of the press, for individual liberty, for the instruction ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Muldev, "is on the northern side of the great mother Ganges, and there too my dwelling is. I travelled to a distant land, and having found in this maiden a worthy wife for my son, I straightway returned homewards. Meanwhile a famine had laid waste our village, and my wife and my son have fled I know not where. Encumbered with this damsel, ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... alienated from his tribe. He lapsed into strife with his fellows. Ambition, vanity, greed, the love of domination, the desire for property and possessions, set in. The influences of fellowship and solidarity grew feebler. He became alienated from his great Mother. His instincts were less and less sure—and that in proportion as brain-activity and self-regarding calculation took their place. Love and mutual help were less compelling in proportion as the demands of self-interest grew ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... to Ellis Island to watch the ships coming in from Europe, and to think that all those weary, sea-tossed wanderers are feeling what I felt when America first stretched out her great mother-hand to me! ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... the Red Man's country, whose gates are so narrow and still closed up, to be of very great importance, both in a commercial and a political point of view; but it is notorious that, after the French Canadians, the Red Man prefers his Great Mother beyond the Great Lake and her subjects to the President and the people, who are rather too near neighbours to be pleasant, and who have somewhat unceremoniously considered the natives of the soil as so many ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... of your stately solitudes! How often have I turned from the tinselled presence of the shore, the infinite pretensions of dry land that make life a sorry, hectic sham, and found in the black bosom of the Great Mother solace and comfort! Dear, lovely sea, man—half of every sphere, as far removed in the sequence of your strong emotions from the painted fripperies of the woman-land as pole from pole—the grateful blessing of the humblest of ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... certain Christian fraternities had been established, and one of these had addressed a prayer to the great mother-community at Alexandria, that it would send to them a presbyter, a deacon and a deaconess capable of organizing and guiding the believers and catechumens in the province of Hermopolis where they were already numbered by thousands. The life of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... lotus-eating Paradise of blissful ignorance, and I love the world with its pomps, vanities, and wickedness. While you, therefore, oh Corydon—don't be afraid, I'm not going to quote Virgil—are studying Nature's book, I am deep in the musty leaves of Themis' volume, but I dare say that the great mother teaches you much better things than her artificial daughter does me. However, you remember that pithy proverb, 'When one is in Rome, one must not speak ill of the Pope,' so being in the legal profession, I must respect its muse. I suppose when you saw that this letter came ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... children Man is really Nature’s prime favourite seems pretty evident, though no one can say why. It is to him that the Great Mother is ever pointing and saying, “A poor creature, but mine own. I shall do something with him some day, but I must not try to force him.” Here, indeed, is the mistake of the Socialists. They think they can force the very creature who above all others cannot be forced. ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... once more, and his thoughts reverted to his mother. Poor mother! No, great mother! The grandeur of her life's struggle filled him with a sense of awe. Strange that until that moment he had never seen the heroic side of her humdrum, commonplace existence! He must write to her, now, at once, before it was too late. His letter ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... whip which is for free-born persons, but with that scourge made with ankle-bones, with which those eunuch sacrificers called Galli were wont to be chastised, when they failed of performing their duty in the ceremonies and sacrifices of the Goddess Cybele, the great Mother of the Gods. ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... years of scarcity, years of famine, darkness without light, death with seeing eyes be fated to him; may he [Bel] order with his potent mouth the destruction of his city, the dispersion of his subjects, the cutting off of his rule, the removal of his name and memory from the land. May Belit, the great Mother, whose command is potent in E-Kur [the Babylonian Olympus], the Mistress, who hearkens graciously to my petitions, in the seat of judgment and decision [where Bel fixes destiny], turn his affairs evil before Bel, and put the devastation of his land, the destruction of his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... the Great Mother should still her restless tongue for the moment. He was doing his duty and the will of his dead father, but his heart ached when he thought of the woman who should be by his side. Oh that they two could undertake this magical journey together, silent ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... work for thy brother thou has many allies; in the winds, in the air, in all the voices of the silent shore." These are the far-wandered powers of our own nature and they turn again home at our need. We came out of the Great Mother-Life for the purposes of soul. Are her darlings forgotten where they darkly wander and strive? Never. Are not the lives of all her heroes proof? Though they seem to stand alone the eternal Mother keeps watch on ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... necessity to name that now,' I insisted. But my father desired them to postpone any further exposition of the case, saying, 'Pleasure first, business by-and-by. That, I take it, is in the order of our great mother Nature, gentlemen. I will not have him help shoulder his father's pack until he has had ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... though it were a part of daily life; This power to hold a passion in his hand,— Which his true eyes declared was measureless,— As though he were its master, utterly. True women are like Nature, their great mother, Stirred on the surface by each passing wind, But ruled by silent forces at the heart. She caught her breath a moment in surprise,— For naught has to the mind more of surprise Than the sweet long-expected, if it come ...
— Under King Constantine • Katrina Trask
... he brought into the world with him; and gives many remarkable instances of it in his childhood, as well as in all the several parts of his life. Nay, on his death-bed, he describes him as being pleased, that while his soul returned to Him who made it, his body should incorporate with the great mother of all things, and by that means become beneficial to mankind. For which reason, he gives his sons a positive order not to enshrine it in gold or silver, but to lay it in the earth as soon as the life ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... in later times such goddesses as Durga assumed in some sects a paramount position, and though the Veda is familiar with the idea of the world being born, there are few traces in it of a goddess corresponding to the Great Mother, Cybele or Astarte. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... me that Mrs. Griffing "was for several years the honored, loved, and trusted agent of the Western Anti-Slavery Society. The fact is indelibly graven on my heart that she was one of the most faithful and indefatigable laborers in the Anti-Slavery cause; she brought a great mother-heart to the work. Under fearful discouragement, she was ever strong and persevering. I do hope that you knew her, even better than I did, and that the history will be a success. Be sure of my heartiest and kindliest sympathy. It is a beautiful work—the effort to preserve and embalm ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... became a sandy desert, and denied the sole gift of fortune, which would have made him completely happy, the disconsolate lover foreswore society for solitude. As some seek religion, so Lambert hoped by seeking Nature's breast to assuage the pains of his sore heart. But although the great Mother could do so much, she could not do all, and the young man still felt restless and weary. Hard work helped him more than a little, but he had his dark hours during those intervals when hand and brain were too weary to ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... quicker pulse than Isaac Hecker when the name of God was heard, or that of Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit. Few men have had a nobler pride in the Church of Christ, or felt more one with her honor. Few men have grown into closer kinship with all the family of God, from Mary the great mother and the holy angels down to the simplest Catholic, than Isaac Hecker. But his peculiar trait was fidelity to the inner voice. "There are some," he once said, "for whom the predominant influence is the external one, ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... by learned men said to be long ignorant of the EGO—blessed in many respects in their ignorance! This same Ego, as it now exists, being perhaps part of "the fruit of that forbidden tree;" that mere knowledge of good as well as of evil, which our great mother bought for us at such a price. In this meaning of the word, Dr. Chalmers, considering the size of his understanding—his personal eminence—his dealings with the world—his large sympathies—his scientific knowledge of mind and matter—his relish for the practical details, and for the spirit of public ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown |
