Mother Wit Quotes

• When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

  Maya Angelou

  Inspirational, Relationship, Inspiring

  Twitter post from Jun 12, 2015

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• I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Life, Family, Mothers Day

  Abraham Lincoln (1907). “The Lincoln Year Book: Axioms and Aphorisms from the Great Emancipator”, p.25, Library of Alexandria

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• I'm grateful to intelligent people. That doesn't mean educated. That doesn't mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call 'mother wit' means intelligence that you had in your mother's womb. That's what you rely on. You know what's right to do.

  Maya Angelou

  Life, Mother, Grateful

  11 Copy quote

• No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life.

  Thomas Huxley

  Life, Mother, Method

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1908). “Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of Thomas Henry Huxley”, p.5, Library of Alexandria

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• There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knolwedge, Grammatica parda, tawny grammar, a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mother, Children, Knowledge

  4 Copy quote

• you can give it a long name if you like, but I'm an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it's so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Mother, Book, Writing

  Dorothy L. Sayers (2013). “The Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries: Whose Body?, Clouds of Witness, and Unnatural Death”, p.408, Open Road Media

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• Listen carefully to what country people call mother wit. In those homely sayings are couched the collective wisdom of generations.

  Maya Angelou

  Mother, Country, People

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• Metaphor is, as a common feature of linguistic practice, an incidental expediency, a homely administering of first-aid by mother-wit to jams or halts in expression suddenly confronting speakers, with no respectable linguistic solution immediately in sight.

  Laura Riding

  Mother, Sight, Expression

  "The Matter of Metaphor". "Rational Meaning and Supplementary Essays". Book by Laura Riding and Schuyler B. Jackson, edited by William Harmon, 1997.

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• What do you do with mother love and mother wit when the babies are grown and gone away?

  Joanne Greenberg

  Mother, Baby, Gone Away

  Joanne Greenberg (1981). “Season of Delight”, Holt McDougal

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• Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

  Christopher Marlowe

  Mother, Veins, Rhyming

  'Tamburlaine the Great' (performed c.1588, published 1590) pt. 1, prologue

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• In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.

  Gustave Le Bon

  Mother, Stupidity, Crowds

  Gustave Le Bon (2009). “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind”, p.33, The Floating Press

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