"Great Mother" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there is so much orniment and gildin' and art in the landscape and folks, that mebby they might forget the great mother of us all, that is, right in the thickest of the crowd they might, but they have only to take these few steps and they will see Ma Nater with her every-day dress on, not fixed up a mite. And I s'pose she looks ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... of human migrations has been outward from that region and not inward. So, too, with the great families of mammals, as we know from fossil remains. From the earliest geological times the vast interior of Asia has been the great mother of the world, the source from which the most important families of living things ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... the tree, which at that height was nearly black. In fact, she became almost invisible from that most curious system of concealment in the world, that of assimilation with nature. She was gathered so closely into the arms of the great mother that she seemed one with her. And she was not alone in the shelter of those mighty arms; there was the squirrel, as indistinguishable as ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and dancing in the ring, and playing foolish tricks with a red-and-white clown, and being stared at by hot, applauding, fluttering tiers of people, who looked exactly the same at every place he came to. His memory of that first walk down the mountain, at his great mother's heels, had been laid to sleep at the back of his curiously occupied brain. He had no understanding of the fierce restlessness, the vague longing, which from time to time, and especially when the autumn frosts ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... enough to hear the terrible war-part of the story, War shall be at an end, please God, and the Red Cross shall mean to the nations left upon the earth what it means to him—arms that enfold a suffering humanity, lips that press a great mother-love to all its hurts and make ...
— The Story of the Red Cross as told to The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... wherever he can find it without infringement on the rights of his fellow beings—none were disposed to deny. That each human animal, as each animal of inferior grade, has, also, the right of subsistence, drained from the bosom of the earth, the great mother of us all, which without his foreknowledge or wish gave him being, seemed, also, indisputable. But when from these propositions were deduced that crime is rather the result of misery than depravity, and that the office of government is more to prevent crime by creating happiness than ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... kind of primitive utterance that was before speech or the development of language; when emotions were still too vague and mighty to be caught by little words, but when beings, close to the heart of their great Mother, expressed the feelings, enormous and uncomplex, of the greater life they shared as portions of her—projections ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... philosophy of Kant, which exalts the dignity of mind so 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 her up under the aspect of some empirical native qualities of the human ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... whip-stalk caused them to fling their guns in the grass, and come crowding round us with extended hands, saying, through those who understood their language, that they were glad to see and shake hands with the subjects of the "Great Mother" ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... at home who would always stand by him. Their common fate drove them into each other's arms like frightened birds at the approach of a storm. All the womanliness in her,—however little it may be appreciated now-a-days,—which is after all nothing but a memory of the great mother, the force of nature which is woman's endowment, was roused. It fell on the children like the warm glow of a fire at eventide; it fell on the husband like a ray of sunshine; it brought peace to the home. He often wondered how it was that he did not ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... 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 ...
— Different Girls • Various
... were still many weary hours from their destination, but the solicitude of the great Mother Fleet for her sons' welfare was plain on every side. There were evidences of a carefully planned, wisely executed organisation in the speed with which the great crowd of blue-jackets and marines of all ranks and ratings, and bound for fifty different ships, were mustered, given ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... slumber of ages, and the auspicious dawn of awakenment will light up the horizon. You must acquire great power from the worship of the Mother. Ganesh, the god who grants success, has his seat assigned to him on the left of the great Mother. Why should you despair of obtaining success? Look at Kartiki, the god who is the chief commander of the armies of the gods, who has stationed himself to the right of the Mother; he is coming forward with ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... said they were navigating through the upper story. Whirlpools were holes in the floor of the upper river, so to speak; eddies were rifts and cracks. And deep under the earth, hurrying toward the subterranean stream, were other streams, small and great, but all deep, hurrying to and from that great mother-stream underneath, just as the small and great overground streams hurry to and from their mother Mississippi. It was almost more than the little convent girl could take in: at least such was the expression of her eyes; for they opened ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... so they were softened and made less awful in their effect. Other gods were more freely taken for models, such as came nearer to human life and thought, because less sublime in their attributes and characters. Among these were Venus as a lovely woman rather than as the great mother of all living creatures, and Eros, or Love; while Plutus, or Wealth, and satyrs, nymphs, and tritons were multiplied in ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... flames of the springing crop, the pulsating emerald of later growth, and the golden sheen of ripened ears, invest the "gift of the gods" with unearthly radiance. The Eastern mind has ever responded to Nature's touch, for the great Mother whispers her closest secrets to simple hearts, and science now realises that civilisation has broken many of the subtle links which in earlier days were mystic bonds of union between man and ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... noble ideal," he said. "La Patrie! The great Mother. Right or wrong, who shall dare to harm her? Yes, if it was she who rose up in her majesty and called to us." He laughed. "What does it mean in reality: Germania, Italia, La France, Britannia? Half a score ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... on the cross," all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues in the empire, might be amalgamated into one immense power. "Salvation is of the Jews."—Christianity is the formula for exceeding and summing up the subterranean cults of all varieties, that of Osiris, that of the Great Mother, that of Mithras, for instance: in his discernment of this fact the genius of Paul showed itself. His instinct was here so sure that, with reckless violence to the truth, he put the ideas which lent fascination to every sort of Chandala religion into ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... now began to remember that the Government had shown them many kindnesses, given them tea and tobacco, and blankets; and provided them with implements to plough the lands, and oxen to draw the ploughs. And some of the chiefs came forward and said "You must not fight against the Great Mother. She loves the Indians. The red man is well treated here better than away south. Ask the Sioux who lived down there; they tell you maybe." Such advice served to set the Indians reflecting; but many hundreds of them preferred to hear Louis ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... 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," ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... disciple, in thy 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 ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... unfrequently the actual form of their most impassioned and elaborate passages. Revision after revision, constructed in corrupt following of the transient and embarrassed phantoms of ephemeral fashion in scholarship, may sink into the Great Mother of Dead Dogs after setting right a tense here, and there transferring a rendering from text to margin or from margin to text. But the work of the unrevised version will remain unaffected by each of these futile exercitations. All the elements, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... himself sitting on the blasted rock of his dreams in the depths of the greening woods. He was well again by this time and conscious of that retightened grasp upon health and redder stir of life with which the great Mother-nurse, if she but dearly love a man, will tend him and mend him and set him on his feet again from a bed of wounds or sickness. It had happened to him also that with this reflushing of his blood there had reached him the voice of Summer advancing northward to all things ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... after, in 205, during the war with Hannibal, it was the Senate itself that sent an ambassador to Asia Minor to seek the goddess Cybele. The Great Mother (as she was called) was represented by a black stone, and this the envoys of the Senate brought in great pomp and installed in Rome. Her priests followed her and paced the streets to the sound of fifes and cymbals, clad in oriental fashion, and begging ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... again, Hath in herself the seed whence she can raise The shining grains and gladsome trees for men; Whence, also, rivers, fronds, and gladsome pastures Can she supply for mountain-roaming beasts. Wherefore great mother of gods, and mother of beasts, And parent of man hath ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... the kind old Moon at all; it was the great mother Sun, just coming up out of her home in the sea, ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... communist village of Economy. I was weak and dizzy from illness and a long journey; the intense quiet of the landscape before me affected me like a strain of solemn music. Knowles had infected me with his eager hope. Nature was about to take me to her great mother's bosom, for the first time. Life was to give me the repose I asked, satisfy all the needs of my soul: here was the foretaste. The quaint little hamlet literally slept on the river-bank; not a living creature was visible on the three grass-grown ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... forest home, the wolf-den, and his little wolf brothers. Especially he did not want to leave his dear foster mother. So he screamed and struggled to get away from the big hunter, and he called to the wolves in their own language to come and help him. Then out of the forest came bounding the great mother wolf with her four children, now grown to be nearly as big as herself. She chased after the fleeting horse and snapped at the loose end of the huntsman's cloak, howling with grief and anger. But she could not catch the thief, nor get back her adopted son, the little smooth-skinned ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... attitude to the Universe is too self-poised and self-centered to be adequately rendered by any word that suggests complete abandonment. It is too—what shall I say?—too sly and demonic—too much inside the little secrets of the great Mother—to be summed up in a word that suggests a sort of Titanic whirlwind of embraces. And yet, on the other hand, it is quite as easy to exaggerate the Olympian aspect of Goethe. When this is carried too far, something in him, something extraordinarily ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... violence that had made his demeanour so embarrassing during and after the dejeuner had vanished. He was a different man. And presently, noticing it, feeling his sensitive serenity, Domini seemed to see the great Mother at work about this child of hers, Nature at her tender task of pacification. The shared silence became to her like a song of thanksgiving, in which all the green things of the garden joined. And beyond them the desert lay listening, the Garden ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... sold half an hour before starting. As the train can take only a limited number, the tickets are generally all taken in the first 10 minutes. The tram runs down the Via Po, crosses the Ponte Vit. EmanueleI., passes by the western end of the church, the "Great Mother of God," and descends by the left side of the Po to the Cassale station, whence the ascent commences by the rope and locomotive railway constructed by Agudio, and opened in 1884. The ascent takes 20 minutes, the length is 3500 ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... were the two great laws the Wheat obeyed. Almost blasphemous in his effrontery, he had tampered with these laws, and had roused a Titan. He had laid his puny human grasp upon Creation and the very earth herself, the great mother, feeling the touch of the cobweb that the human insect had spun, had stirred at last in her sleep and sent her omnipotence moving through the grooves of the world, to find and crush the disturber ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... They are cold, great Mother Ocean; but not so cold as love burned out, leaving but the bitter ashes of contemptuous pity. I dreamed that I was afloat upon thy bosom with her I did so dearly love, and thou wast bearing us beneath a sunset sky to a fair island, fringed with palms and musical with ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... those of us—and I am one—who reasoning that the "groves were God's first temples," flee to a twilight hill top or to a forest shade, and, as Mr. Stokes said, "Sit humbly at the feet of the great mother of us all. There is wisdom and healing in the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... the great mother lode and take out the treasure, part of it is to be yours, of course," ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... go on as a great mother nation, contributing to the culture and the progress and the good will of all mankind— developing her special talents in the arts and crafts and sciences, and preserving her historic and cultural heritage for ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... could be afforded at the present day by the simplest grammar-school of the country. Here again we may trace the resemblance between his career and that of Washington. Equally denied the advantages of education, they equally drew from the great mother-sources of nature. Thrown upon their own thoughts, taught by observation and experience—the same results of character,—firmness, temperance, good sense, sagacious foresight, and deliberate prudence—became conspicuous in the conduct and career of both. In the fortunes ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... of 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 of the people ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... for such an use, as if 'twere meant T' invite the builder, and his choice prevent. Nor can we call it choice, when what we choose, Folly or blindness only could refuse. A crown of such majestic towers doth grace The gods' great mother, when her heavenly race 60 Do homage to her, yet she cannot boast, Among that num'rous and celestial host. More heroes than can Windsor; nor doth Fame's Immortal book record more noble names. Not to look back so far, to whom this isle Owes the first glory of so brave a pile, ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... can they come?" he weakly asked. "Where are they, the soldiers of the Great Mother? Riel has said that those stories of the cities over seas and the many red-coats are all lies, and that the Lord will smite the Police and those that are in the country with the anthrax that kills the cattle in the spring. Riel swears to that, ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... common, and shook the purple wild-flowers that grew along the wayside. It was laden with the odour of the sheaves that were spread over the fields amid the brown stubble, and seemed to waft to him something of the elemental poetry of the great mother Earth, of the informing spirit of religions of antiquity, of the human joy in the harvest festival, of the symbolic cornucopia, of the ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... of a great mother centers on her son. Pythagoras was filled with the thought that he was different, peculiar, set apart to teach the ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... want to leave his dear foster mother. So he screamed and struggled to get away from the big hunter, and he called to the wolves in their own language to come and help him. Then out of the forest came bounding the great mother-wolf with her four children, now grown to be nearly as big as herself. She chased the fleeting horse and snapped at the loose end of the huntsman's cloak, howling with grief and anger. But she could not get the thief, nor get back her adopted son, the little smooth-skinned foundling. ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... Cf. Sec. 129 and notes. The books probably contained the formulae of initiation, or the hymns which were chanted by some Dionysiac societies. The service described here is probably that of the combined worship of Dionysus-Sabazios and the Great Mother (Cybele). ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... stood at that time near the Old Place...." She made a curious gesture with the fingers of her right hand. "It will soon be the time of sowing, and though Lurgha brings sun and rain to feed the grain, yet it is in the Great Mother that the seed lies. Upon her business only women may go into the Inner Circle." She gestured again. "But as we met to make the first sacrifice there came music out of the air such as we have never heard, voices singing like ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... study of dragons impressed upon me the importance of the part played by the Great Mother, especially in her Babylonian avatar as Tiamat, in the evolution of the famous wonder-beast. Under the stimulus of Dr. Rendel Harris's Rylands Lecture on "The Cult of Aphrodite," I therefore devoted my next address (14 November, ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... reservoir of your vital forces is full to the overflow of a little waste; or perhaps, more subtly, the great Mother insists thus that you enter the temple ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... new valley under the sunlight that still came strongly from behind the enormous mountains; everything also was new, and I was evidently now in a country of a special kind. The slopes were populous, I had come to the great mother of fruits and men, and I was soon to see her cities and her old walls, and the rivers that glide by them. Church towers also repeated the same shapes up and up the wooded hills until the villages stopped at the line of the higher ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... this Loki replied in musing voice, nodding his head as he spoke: "Yea, thou art right, great Mother of Gods ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... of France, the poilu, is a crusader. He is fighting to defend France, his great mother, in whose defense, centuries ago, the invisible powers called and sustained Jeanne d'Arc. In his love of country there is something almost religious, like that of the Mohammedan for Mecca and Medina. To serve ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... pity. She'd make a great mother, wouldn't she? But life doesn't seem able to get along without ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... was that Momaya reasoned shrewdly that if any might know the whereabouts of her Tibo, it would be Bukawai, who was in friendly intercourse with gods and demons, since a demon or a god it was who had stolen her baby; but even her great mother love was sorely taxed to find the courage to send her forth into the black jungle toward the distant hills and the uncanny abode of Bukawai, ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... "O Isis, great Mother Goddess, mother of the Horus—mysterious Mother, Sister, Spouse, hearken unto me. If, indeed, I am the chosen of the Gods to carry out the purpose of the Gods, let a sign be given me, even now, to seal my life to the life above. Stretch out your arms towards ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... isn't decent and it isn't manly. Return to Nature! It's only too easy to return, and stay. You'll do no good at all if you've never been there; but if you mean to grow up you must break loose and get away. The great mother is inclined to bug some of her children rather too tight, I fancy; and by Heaven! it's pretty tough work for some of them wriggling out of ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... the hardy wheat is rippling on the breeze. 'Tis our great mother's sacred mantle spread afar, Old Earth revered, who gives us life, in whom we are, We the dull clay the living God molds as ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various |
