Birth Quotes

...there was apparent in all a sort of anxiety, a softening of the heart, and a consciousness of some great, unfathomable mystery being accomplished... the most solemn mystery in the world was being accomplished. Evening passed, night came on. And the feeling of suspense and softening of the heart before the unfathomable did not wane, but grew more intense. No one slept.

Leo Tolstoy

I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws our country.

Thomas Jefferson

Men must endureTheir going hence, even as their coming hither.Ripeness is all.

William Shakespeare

True art comes out of an artist's urgent need to express the feelings that have formed inside him, just as a mother needs to give birth to her baby. False art answers only to profit.

Leo Tolstoy

Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.

Walter Benjamin

For as old age is that period of life most remote from infancy, who does not see that old age in this universal man ought not to be sought in the times nearest his birth, but in those most remote from it?

Blaise Pascal

I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition.

Sir Thomas Browne

Good birth is a fine thing, but the merit is our ancestors.

Plutarch

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. The soul that rises with us, our life's star, hath had elsewhere its setting, and comet from afar: not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.

William Wordsworth

Philosophy is like a mother who gave birth to and endowed all the other sciences. Therefore, one should not scorn her in her nakedness and poverty, but should hope, rather, that part of her Don Quixote ideal will live on in her children so that they do not sink into philistinism.

Albert Einstein

I came to the place of my birth and cried, The friends of my youth, where are they? And echo answered, Where are they?

Arabic Proverb

Birth and death are not two different states, but they are different aspects of the same state. There is as little reason to deplore the one as there is to be pleased over the other.

Mahatma Gandhi

These wretched babies don't come until they are ready.

Queen Elizabeth

We have been God-like in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.

Arnold J. Toynbee

He plough'd her, and she cropp'd.

William Shakespeare

Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality. Every pregnant woman has body and self taken over by a chthonian force beyond her control. In the welcome pregnancy, this is a happy sacrifice. But in the unwanted one, initiated by rape or misadventure, it is a horror. Such unfortunate women look directly into nature's heart of Darkness. For a fetus is a benign tumor, a vampire who steals in order to live. The so-called miracle of birth is nature getting her own way.

Camille Anna Paglia

I have no conscience, none, but I would not like to bring a soul into this world. When it sinned and when it suffered something like a dead hand would fall on me, -- You did it, you, for your own pleasure you created this thing! See your work! If it lived to be eighty it would always hang like a millstone round my neck, have the right to demand good from me, and curse me for its sorrow. A parent is only like to God: if his work turns out bad so much the worse for him; he dare not wash his hands of it. Time and years can never bring the day when you can say to your child, Soul, what have I to do with you?

Olive Schreiner

Good work, Mary. We all knew you had it in you.

Dorothy Parker

A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.

George Gurdjieff

I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.

Annie Dillard