Quotes: Morning. Motherhood. Motivation.

A collection of quotes on various topics. The sentence in bold face is a plain statement of the quote that follows.

Morning
On a pleasant morning, men’s sins are forgiven.
Morning 573 In a pleasant spring morning all men’s sins are forgiven. Thoreau, Walden.

Let me breathe the morning air.
Morning 432 …let me have a draught of undiluted morning air…. Thoreau, Walden.

Motherhood
The mother knows she has brought forth this spirit, but does not have the power to control it.
Motherhood 197 The mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the master-word that should control this new and incomprehensible intelligence. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.

As long as you have a mother, you will never stop being a child.
Mothers 405 Mrs. Todd: There, you never get over bein’ a child long’s you have a mother to go to. Jewett, The country of the Pointed Firs.

She remembers him before he was born and now sees him as a strong, brave man.
Mothers and Sons 272 Just as twenty years before she could not believe that the little creature that was lying somewhere under her heart would one day wail and suck her breast and begin to talk, so now it was incredible that that little creature could be this strong, brave man, the paragon of sons and men, that judging by this letter he was now. Tolstoi, War and Peace.

Motivation
His motivation was to be indispensable to others.
Motivation 241 He found something that he wanted…not to be admired…not to be loved…but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable…. Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise.

Revulsion at one’s unwanted self motivates losing individuality and merging into a collective whole.
Motivation 62 The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one’s individual distinctness in a compact collective whole. Hoffer, The True Believer

We see in others the faults in ourselves.
Motivation 128 We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves. Hoffer, The True Believer

My interest in DNA came from my interest in learning what a gene was.
Motivation 21 My interest in DNA had grown out of a desire, first picked up while a senior in college, to learn what a gene was. Watson, The Double Helix.

We don’t understand our motivations.
Motivation 519 …even the best of us have trouble understanding our motivations. Irving Stone, The Passions of the Mind (Life of Freud).

The basic motivations are ambition, power and pleasure.
Motivation 138 Faulkner: Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move--which is ambition, power, pleasure. Cowley, ed., Writers at Work.

I act to imitate.
Motivation 700 Montaigne: Most of my actions are guided by example, not choice. Emerson, Representative Men: Montaigne, or The Skeptic.

In seeking to do something we are seeking to escape from life.
Motivation 636 And it seemed to Pierre that all men were…seeking refuge from life: some in ambition, some in cards, some in framing laws, some in women, some in playthings, some in horses, some in politics, some in sport, some in wine, and some in government service. Tolstoi, War and Peace.

One’s spirit is the basic motivation.
Motivation 165 …men are motivated by their spirits. Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream.

We take satisfaction in doing something because it is not a common experience.
Motive 577 In a small way we were the same sort of simpletons as those who climb unnecessarily the perilous peaks of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn and derive no pleasure from it except the reflection that it isn’t a common experience. Twain, Roughing It

Hawthorne was concerned with the unspoken motives of heart and mind.
Motives 8 With his [Hawthorne] instinct for the unspoken motives of the heart and mind.... Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.