Mom, this quote's for you

Mothers Day is the holiest of holidays.

Think about it: Where would you be without your mother? And without the great mothers who have made such a tremendous impact on their children, where would our planet be?

In honor of moms everywhere, we share these enlightening perspectives with you.

• "It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding."

- Erma Bombeck

• "Being a full-time mother is one of the highest salaried jobs... since the payment is pure love."

- Mildred B. Vermont

• "A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie."

- Tenneva Jordan

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

- Irish proverb

• "The mother loves her child most divinely, not when she surrounds him with comfort and anticipates his wants, but when she resolutely holds him to the highest standards and is content with nothing less than his best."

- Hamilton Wright Mabie

• "Men are what their mothers made them."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "Motherhood is the keystone of the arch of matrimonial happiness."

- Thomas Jefferson

• "The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom."

- Henry Ward Beecher

• "No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement."

- Florida Scott-Maxwell

• "The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother."

- Theodore M. Hesburgh

• "Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not."

- James Joyce

• "A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials, heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine, desert us when troubles thicken around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavour by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts."

- Washington Irving

• "The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness."

- Honore de Balzac