Midwife Quotes

Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.

How does your experience of one sense affect all the others? In addition to being the conduits of pleasure and pain, your senses are the midwives of intelligence.

A mathematics teacher is a midwife to ideas.

How did we ever get the idea that God would supply us on demand with quick fixes, that God is merely a rescuer and not a midwife?

I've had so many rebirths, I should come with my own midwife by now.

I had amazing midwives when I first became a teen-aged mom, and each of the five times I gave birth.

Adversity is the midwife of genius

The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery.

No times were more dangerous than when our country was born, when revolution was our midwife.

The writer is the midwife of understanding.

Prayer is the midwife of mercy, that helps to bring it forth.

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.

I still deliver like a midwife

Pain is God's midwife, that helps some virtue into existence.

It's not just the making of babies, but the making of mothers that midwives see as the miracle of birth.

My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home, or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.

I was not the midwife of the Law School, but its fraternal twin.

Other days, other ways; and, although they have now been greatly improved upon, the old country midwives did at least succeed in bringing into the world many generations of our forefathers, or where should we be now? —

Women are being told to get midwives [in UK] because there's not enough room and there's not enough pain medicine at the hospitals.

When you destroy midwives, you also destroy a body of knowledge that is shared by women, that can’t be put together by a bunch of surgeons or a bunch of male obstetricians, because physiologically, birth doesn’t happen the same way around surgeons, medically trained doctors, as it does around sympathetic women.

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.

Well, I've just played a midwife but never for a second would I think that I could ever deliver a baby! So, to that essence, it's still pretending. But it's worked out ok so far, touch wood, because you're doing so many different things - if you're playing a lawyer or someone medical, you can dip your toe into a lot of different things.

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

Socrates, whose mother was a midwife, used to say that his art was like the art of the midwife. She does not herself give birth to the child, but she is there to help during its delivery. Similarly, Socrates saw his task as helping people to 'give birth' to correct insight, since real understanding must come from within. . . . Everybody can grasp philosophical truths if they just use their innate reason.

I watched Ricki Lake's documentary, 'The Business of Being Born,' and that led me to call a midwife, and not an ob-gyn, when I found out I had conceived. My delivery was not easy - they call it 'labor,' not 'a vacation!' - but I was incredibly grateful that I did it that way.

Paddy was in the delivery room when the midwife handed him a black baby. "Is this yours?" she asked "probably" said Paddy "she burns everything else"

As a midwife, I am immersed in Oxytocin day and night.

There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife - a tyrannical midwife.

A film director is not a creator, but a midwife. His business is to deliver the actor of a child that he did not know he had inside him.

How to you teach someone that a theatre comes about first as an idea, from an individual who has a philosophy and a passion? That a theatre's idea is its heart and individual soul? That the person who creates it must have the desire not only to create work, but also to create the conditions in which that work can live-and in which others can do it as well? How do you teach someone to want to be a midwife as well as a mother.

the sudden violent dispossession accompanying a refugee flight is much more than the loss of a permanent home and a traditional occupation, or than the parting from close friends and familiar places. It is also the death of the person one has become in a particular context, and every refugee must be his or her own midwife at the painful process of rebirth.

The Creator is not a careless mechanic.

I try to be a lot of things for the authors I work with - a careful reader, a helpful friend who also happens to be an experienced writer, a thoughtful editor, and a creative midwife.

The Mean Value Theorem is the midwife of calculus - not very important or glamorous by itself, but often helping to deliver other theorems that are of major significance.

Speak tenderly; let there be kindness in your face, in your eyes, in your smile, in the warmth of your greeting. Always have a cheerful smile. Don't only give your care, but give your heart as well.

Talk and write in a way that encourages the mutual exchange of ideas and acts like a midwife to people birthing their own ideas.

The listener is the midwife in the difficult birth of the word.

No other natural bodily function is painful and childbirth should not be an exception

If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.

There I was out in the barn playing midwife to a pregnant mare. I remember sitting there, spinning yarn in the light of a little oil lamp, a city girl who knew nothing about farming, sitting on the deel beside that mother in pain, already beginning the birthing process. All around me there was darkness and perfect silence, except for the mother's pain. It was as if the war didn't exist in those hours.

If we want to find safe alternatives to obstetrics, we must rediscover midwifery. To rediscover midwifery is the same as giving back childbirth to women. And imagine the future if surgical teams were at the service of the midwives and the women instead of controlling them.

Birth is not only about making babies. Birth is about making mothers.

Birth is about making mothers... strong, competent, capable mothers who trust themselves and know their inner strength

Every midwife knows that not until a mother’s womb softens from the pain of labor will a way unfold and the infant find that opening to be born. Oh friend! There is treasure in your heart, it is heavy with child. Listen. All the awakened ones, like trusted midwives are saying, 'welcome this pain. It opens the dark passage of Grace.

The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn't damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

When you are in hard labor, remember that the length of labor is usually proportional to the number of people around. Avoid the presence of anybody who might release adrenaline. The best situation I know for an easy birth is when there is nobody else around than an experienced, motherly and silent midwife who does not behave like a guide or an observer.

If birth matters, midwives matter. In Europe, there are hospitals where the cesarean rate is less than 10%, and you'll find midwives in these hospitals, you'll see a lot less re-admissions with infections and complications, and you'll see a lot less injury to mothers.

Madame Lefoux acted as midwife. In her scientific way, she was unexpectedly adept at the job. When the infant finally appeared, she held it up for Alexia to see, rather proudly, as though she'd done all the hard work herself. 'Goodness,' said an exhausted Lady Maccon, 'are babies customarily that repulsive looking?