quotations about birth
Into the world we come like ships,
Launch'd from the docks, and stocks, and slips,
For fortune fair or fatal!
THOMAS HOOD
Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg
A natural birth is a manifestation of spontaneous expression and cannot be schooled, urged, or thrust upon a mode of living that is not natural. It requires only a clear channel, a body in health, a mind in understanding, a whole being that is totally open.
MARIA ROSENSTEIN
"The Yoga of Giving Birth," Yoga Journal, Nov. 1975
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear
We die, just as we were born, at the edge of a road not of our choosing.
AMIN MAALOUF
Orígenes
Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither.
Ripeness is all.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, King Lear
Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.
MAY SARTON
Journal of a Solitude
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Interpretation of Dreams
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 cometh 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
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
Birth and death--what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it's freakish, let's face it.
ROHINTON MISTRY
A Fine Balance
I'm not interested in being Wonder Woman in the delivery room. Give me drugs.
MADONNA
attributed, The 2,320 Funniest Quotes
Birth, copulation, and death.
Is this your life?
CARCASS
"This Is Your Life"
Zippin' up my boots
Goin' back to my roots
To the place of my birth
Back down to earth
RICHIE HAVENS
"Going Back to My Roots", Connections
Blessed indeed are those who were never born to see the sun!
PHILIPPUS OF THESSALONICA
Epigram
After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die.
E.B. WHITE
Charlotte's Web
I came upstairs into the world, for I was born in a cellar.
WILLIAM CONGREVE
Love for Love
Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
ADRIENNE RICH
Of Woman Born
From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Man's birth is a lottery; it may be in the pleasant home of ease and affluence, or in the hut of poverty; in either case it may be a stain or an honor. If he is born in poverty, and his future life throws a lustre over an humble birth, the reward will not only be great, but his name will stand higher on the roll of honor and virtue, than he who can only boast of his proud descent.
JAMES ELLIS
attributed, Day's Collacon
The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die--although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born.
ERICH FROMM
The Sane Society
Everything that came after that first bright moment of birth is like an unbroken chain from which everything we know was given its form and meaning.
BOB ALBA
The Book of Love