Rita Levi-Montalcini Quotes

I am a perfect case study for the transition from no maternal instinct to the love of motherhood.

I've always wanted to have kids. I do think I would be a great mom.

My sister has three kids so I've spent a lot of time around children and I've always really liked them and wanted my own. It's cool because you think all babies are the same but they aren't at all. They all have such different personalities. It's crazy.

I've noticed that since I've been pregnant I see babies everywhere. I love talking to them. I never used to really like kids that much. I guess it comes out of you naturally.

Fortunately, when you're a mom, the responsibility of caring for your child can keep you going.

I always thought I'd be the quintessential Earth Mother, but when I had Harrison, I really wasn't the natural mother that I always thought I would be. I adore children, but I was never that interested in newborn babies.

I like being a mother.

I just love motherhood.

I'm not cut out to lug babies around!

I happen to find motherhood a very natural state, but I know a lot of other people don't.

I have no maternal instinct whatsoever. Motherhood holds no interest for me.

I feel like there are women who are genuinely born to be mothers, and women who are born to be aunties, and women who really probably not should be allowed near children. The tragedy that happens is when any one of those women ends up in the wrong category.

I definitely don't want to have kids. I don't think I'd be a great mother. I don't want to have a kid and have it raised by a nanny. I don't have the time to raise a child.

I always wanted to be a mother first.

I have no maternal instincts.

There's no substitute for the experience of childbearing or child rearing.

We [women] have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that ... takes time.

An innocent little human being was solely dependent on me! I took all the CPR and breastfeeding classes and learned quite a bit.

Mothers ought to bring up and nurse their own children; for they bring them up with greater affection and with greater anxiety, as loving them from the heart, and so to speak, every inch of them.

I've never been particularly maternal.

I just ultimately wanted to be a mother. I love children.

I totally want, like, 18 babies.

He didn't come out of my belly, but my God, I've made his bones, because I've attended to every meal, and how he sleeps, and the fact that he swims like a fish because I took him to the ocean. I'm so proud of all those things. But he is my biggest pride.

The natural state of motherhood is unselfishness. When you become a mother, you are no longer the center of your own universe. You relinquish that position to your children.

So although women can do anything that men can't do, they can also do something that men can't do, and that is mother their children.