"All that I am or hope to be," said Lincoln, after he had become President, "I owe to my angel mother."
"My mother was the making of me," said Thomas Edison, recently. "She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt that I had some one to live for; some one I must not disappoint."
"All that I have ever accomplished in life," declared Dwight L. Moody, the great evangelist, "I owe to my mother."
"To the man who has had a good mother, all women are sacred for her sake," said Jean Paul Richter.
The testimony of great men in acknowledgment of the boundless debt they owe to their mothers would make a record stretching from the dawn of history to to-day. Few men, indeed, become great who do not owe their greatness to a mother's love and inspiration.
How often we hear people in every walk of life say, "I never could have done this thing but for my mother. She believed in me, encouraged me when others saw nothing in me."
"A kiss from my mother made me a painter," said Benjamin West.
A distinguished man of to-day says: "I never could have reached my present position had I not known that my mother expected me to reach it. From a child she made me feel that this was the position she expected me to fill; and her faith spurred me on and gave me the power to attain it."
Everything that a man has and is he owes to his mother. From her he gets health, brain, encouragement, moral character, and all his chances of success.
"In the shadow of every great man's fame walks his mother," says Dorothy Dix. "She has paid the price of his success. She went down into the Valley of the Shadow to give him life, and every day for years and years thereafter she toiled incessantly to push him on toward his goal.