90 Inspiring Birth Quotes

The journey of bringing new life into the world is an awe-inspiring experience filled with profound emotions and transformative moments. Whether you're preparing for the arrival of your own little one, offering support to a friend or loved one, or simply seeking a dose of motivation, birth quotes can serve as powerful reminders of the strength, beauty, and hope that come with childbirth. In this collection, we've curated the top 90 inspiring birth quotes that capture the essence of this magical process and celebrate the resilience of mothers everywhere. Let these words uplift your spirit and draw you closer to the miraculous adventure of welcoming a new life.

1. “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.” - Simone de Beauvoir

2. “After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die.” - E.B. White

3. “The only sin is the sin of being born” - Samuel Beckett

4. “My mother groaned, my father wept,into the dangerous world I leapt.” - William Blake

5. “Remember this, for it is as true and true gets: Your body is not a lemon. You are not a machine. The Creator is not a careless mechanic. Human female bodies have the same potential to give birth well as aardvarks, lions, rhinoceri, elephants, moose, and water buffalo. Even if it has not been your habit throughout your life so far, I recommend that you learn to think positively about your body.” - Ina May Gaskin

6. “$13 to $20 billion a year could be saved in health care costs by demedicalizing childbirth, developing midwifery, and encouraging breastfeeding.” - Frank Oski

7. “Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.” - Erma Bombeck

8. “Among industrialized countries, the U.S. ranks 29th in infant survival.” - Jennifer Block

9. “Of course, if 40% of women need oxytocin to progress normally, then something is wrong with the definition of normal.” - Henci Goer

10. “The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.” - E. M. Forster

11. “I took the life of the woman I was supposed to call mother in the process of being born... in order to become the world's strongest shinobi... an incarnation of sand was implanted inside of me...” - Masashi Kishimoto

12. “Endless moons, an opaque universe, thunder, tornadoes, the quaking earth. Rare moments of peace; forehead up against my knees, arms around my head, I thought, I listened, I longed not to exist. But life was there, a transparent pearl, a star revolving slowly on its own axis.” - Shan Sa

13. “They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel.” - Gabrielle Zevin

14. “The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.” - T.S. Eliot

15. “Man would not be man if his dreams did not exceed his grasp. ... Like John Donne, man lies in a close prison, yet it is dear to him. Like Donne's, his thoughts at times overleap the sun and pace beyond the body. If I term humanity a slime mold organism it is because our present environment suggest it. If I remember the sunflower forest it is because from its hidden reaches man arose. The green world is his sacred center. In moments of sanity he must still seek refuge there. ... If I dream by contrast of the eventual drift of the star voyagers through the dilated time of the universe, it is because I have seen thistledown off to new worlds and am at heart a voyager who, in this modern time, still yearns for the lost country of his birth.” - Loren Eiseley

16. “Birth is not only about making babies. Birth is about making mothers--strong, competent, capable mothers who trust themselves and know their inner strength.” - Barbara Katz Rothman

17. “God schedules a birthday, not man.” - Robert A. Bradley

18. “He came into the world like a delivery that no one knew what to do with, and nobody wanted to sign for.” - Obert Skye

19. “If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.” - Fernando Pessoa

20. “Actually I don't remember being born, it must have happened during one of my black outs.” - Jim Morrison

21. “Are you sure you weren't adopted?""Mom would like to think so, but it was a natural birth, so her memory's real clear.” - Jana Deleon

22. “We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.” - Hunter S. Thompson

23. “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

24. “How you approach birth is intimately connected with how you approach life” - William Sears

25. “Failing to listen to the woman is one of the biggest mistakes a practitioner can make.” - Helen Varney

26. “There is just as much beauty in birth as there is in death, and it changes our lives just the same. They both add things to us and take things away." Pg. 155 Undone” - Brooke Taylor

27. “Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' ('Can't'?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.'All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was:There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man!Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.” - Christopher Hitchens

28. “It is important to keep in mind that our bodies must work pretty well, or their wouldn't be so many humans on the planet.” - Ina May Gaskin

29. “It would be a mistake, though, to consider care by family doctors or midwives inferior to that offered by obstetricians simply on the grounds that obstetricians need not refer care to a family physician or midwife if no complications develop during a course of labor.” - Ina May Gaskin

30. “Childbirth is normal until proven otherwise.” - Peggy Vincent

31. “The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.” - Sebastian Barry

32. “He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

33. “Prayer before BirthI am not yet born; O hear me.Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club-footed ghoul come near me.I am not yet born, console me.I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me, with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me, on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.I am not yet born; provide meWith water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me.I am not yet born; forgive meFor the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me, my treason engendered by traitors beyond me, my life when they murder by means of my hands, my death when they live me.I am not yet born; rehearse meIn the parts I must play and the cues I must take when old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white waves call me to folly and the desert calls me to doom and the beggar refuses my gift and my children curse me.I am not yet born; O hear me,Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God come near me.I am not yet born; O fill meWith strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton, would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face, a thing, and against all those who would dissipate my entirety, would blow me like thistledown hither and thither or hither and thither like water held in the hands would spill me.Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.Otherwise kill me.” - Louis MacNeice

34. “It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?” - Gregory Maguire

35. “For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal.” - Hermann Hesse

36. “I am what the water gave me, / a smoke-ring in a jar, / the braided rope / my ladder-to-the-light, / my shivering bird heart / caught” - Pascale Petit

37. “Men must endureTheir going hence, even as their coming hither.Ripeness is all.” - William Shakespeare

38. “COSMIC DANCER""I was dancing when I was twelveI was dancing when I was aaahI danced myself right out the wombIs it strange to dance so soonI danced myself right out the wombI was dancing when I was eightIs it strange to dance so lateI danced myself into the tombIs it strange to dance so soonI danced myself into the tombIs it wrong to understandThe fear that dwells inside a manWhat's it like to be a loonI liken it to a balloonI danced myself out of the wombIs it strange to dance to soonI danced myself into the tombBut then again once moreI danced myself out of the wombIs it strange to dance so soonI danced myself out of the womb.” - Marc Bolan

39. “The birthing wolf,Her heart fed with tenderness,Gave forth from ripe brown nipples,Food to feed the universe.” - Roman Payne

40. “One of the strangest things is the act of creation.You are faced with a blank slate—a page, a canvas, a block of stone or wood, a silent musical instrument.You then look inside yourself. You pull and tug and squeeze and fish around for slippery raw shapeless things that swim like fish made of cloud vapor and fill you with living clamor. You latch onto something. And you bring it forth out of your head like Zeus giving birth to Athena.And as it comes out, it takes shape and tangible form.It drips on the canvas, and slides through your pen, it springs forth and resonates into the musical strings, and slips along the edge of the sculptor’s tool onto the surface of the wood or marble.You have given it cohesion. You have brought forth something ordered and beautiful out of nothing.You have glimpsed the divine.” - Vera Nazarian

41. “I take thee at thy word:Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;Henceforth I never will be Romeo.” - William Shakespeare

42. “The energy it took to exit mother’s womb is the same force required to manifest a dream...a different kind of struggle. Push, push, push!” - T.F. Hodge

43. “... we die, just as we were born, at the edge of a road not of our choosing.” - amin maalouf

44. “...there was apparent in all a sort of anxiety, a softening of the heart, and a consciousness of some great, unfathomable mystery being accomplished... the most solemn mystery in the world was being accomplished. Evening passed, night came on. And the feeling of suspense and softening of the heart before the unfathomable did not wane, but grew more intense. No one slept.” - Leo Tolstoy

45. “It's the strangest feeling at the end of pregnancy: you look down at this huge belly and try to imagine how some little person, whom you haven't even met, is going to emerge from it any day and completely change your lives. First, you wonder how this pregnancy, to which you've grown so accustomed over much of the last year, can, with barely any notice, come to an abrupt end. Then you try to fathom how this baby is ever going to come out; your bowling ball stomach seems misproportioned for what lies between it and the outside world. And only then do you realize what it all means-that the easy part, pregnancy, is almost over, and it's time to gear up for the tough stuff: childbirth!” - Lise Eliot

46. “Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.” - May Sarton

47. “I erupt from the dark, crushing tunnel into a flash of light and noise. A new kind of air surrounds me, dry and cold, as they wipe the last smears of home off my skin. I feel a sharp pain as they snip something, and suddenly I am less. I am no one but myself, tiny and feeble and utterly alone. I am lifted and swungthrough great heights across yawning distances, and given to Her. She wraps around me, so much bigger and softer than I ever imagined from inside,and I strain my eyes open. I see Her. She is immense, cosmic. She is the world. The world smiles down on me, and when She speaks it’s the voice of God, vast and resonant with meaning, but words unknowable, ringing gibberish in my blank white mind.” - Isaac Marion

48. “It was no accident, no coincidence, that the seasons came round and round year after year. It was the Lord speaking to us all and showing us over and over again the birth, life, death, and resurrection of his only begotten Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ, our Lord. It was like a best-loved story being told day after day with each sunrise and sunset, year after year with the seasons, down through the ages since time began.” - Francine Rivers

49. “When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.” - Jeanette Winterson

50. “Men were created before women. ... But that doesn't prove their superiority – rather, it proves ours, for they were born out of the lifeless earth in order that we could be born out of living flesh. And what's so important about this priority in creation, anyway? When we are building, we lay foundations on the ground first, things of no intrinsic merit or beauty, before subsequently raising up sumptuous buildings and ornate palaces. Lowly seeds are nourished in the earth, and then later the ravishing blooms appear; lovely roses blossom forth and scented narcissi.” - Moderata Fonte

51. “Beyond the immediate risks to her health and the health of her baby, when a woman chooses c-section, she decreases the chance that she will be able to get pregnant again and increases the chance that if she does get pregnant, the pregnancy will occur outside the uterus, a situation that never results in a live baby and is life-threatening to the woman. Furthermore, the risk of having an unexplained stillbirth doubles when a woman has had a previous c-section.” - Marsden Wagner

52. “...the total number of pregnancies in which powerful and dangerous drugs are used is 60 percent, or nearly two-thirds of all births. It is rediculous to think that two-thirds of American women have such lousy uteruses that they must be whipped into shape with drugs in order to have babies.” - Marsden Wagner

53. “Ina May Gaskin is the most important person in maternity care in North America, bar none.” - Marsden Wagner

54. “Why should insurance companies continue to get away with limiting the skills that a health profession has always previously required of its members if they were to be considered fully trained?” - Ina May Gaskin

55. “But after years of teaching, we have decided that a lot of mothers just aren't reading textbooks.” - Susan McCutcheon-Rosegg

56. “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

57. “The heart is capable of sacrifice. So is the vagina. The heart is able to forgive and repair. It can change it's shape to let us in. It can expand to let us out. So can the vagina. It can ache for us and stretch for us, die for us and bleed and bleed us into this difficult, wondrous world. So can the vagina. I was there in the room. I remeber.” - Eve Ensler

58. “Oh my God!” Sam said again, his voice shaking. I’ve given birth to something inhuman, Phoebe thought. A lamprey with row after row of teeth.” - Jennifer McMahon

59. “I am often slow in catching up to the times, but even so, I still cannot even grip this idea: With nothing more than pitocin in your IV drip, you can sooner control the date and time of the birth of a human being-- the gushing entry into the great blue world of a whole new person-- than you can the scheduling of a few line cooks in your operation.” - Gabrielle Hamilton

60. “For that half-hour in the hospital delivery room I was intimate with immensity, for that half-minute before birth I held her hands and for that duration we three were undivided, I felt the blood of her pulse as we gripped hands, felt her blood beat in the rhythm that reached into the baby as she slipped into the doctor's hands, and for a few days we touched that immensity, we saw through her eyes to an immense intimacy, saw through to where she had come from, I felt important being next to her, and the feeling lasted when we entered our car for the drive home, thinking to myself that we weren't to be trusted with our baby, the feeling lasting while I measured us against the landscape, the February rain, the pewter sky, and then the rain freezing to the roadway, the warmth of the interior of the car with its unbreakable transparent sky dome and doors, until the car spun on the ice in the lane and twirled so that I could take an hour to describe how I threw up my hands in anguish as the baby slipped from her arms and whipped into the face of her mother reflected in the glass door, and she caught the baby back into her arms as the car glided to a stop in its usual place at the end of the drive, and nothing but silence and a few drops of blood at a nostril suggested that we would now be intimate with the immensities of death ("Interim")” - William S. Wilson

61. “At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.” - Benjamin J. Carey

62. “I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!” - Roman Payne

63. “He dropped the joint in the dirt and ran inside. It wasn't his first, and wouldn't be his last. The joint, that is. Not the kid. He was pretty sure, at this point, that he would never have sexual relations with his wife again.” - Allie Burke

64. “Birth is okay and death is okay, if we know that they are only concepts in our mind. Reality transcends both birth and death.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

65. “We must learn to accept ourselves in the painful experiment of living. We must embrace the spiritual adventure of becoming human, moving through the many stages that lie between birth and death.” - Johann Baptist Metz

66. “It rewrites the contract, I'd read somewhere. Your self's no longer central. This thing comes out of you and drags half your soul along after it like a blanket.” - Glen Duncan

67. “If women lose the right to say where and how they birth their children, then they will have lost something that's as dear to life as breathing.” - Ami McKay

68. “The desires for both a good experience and a healthy baby are very much connected, and there is nothing wrong with wanting both!” - Jennetta Billhimer

69. “Should you ever feel too lonely...listen for the roar of the sea- for in it are all those who've been and all those who are to come.” - Simon Van Booy

70. “Where is an intimate friend who’ll hear the secret from me straight out– of what human beings have been from the moment they began? They are born of toil and molded from the clay of sorrow.They wander the world for a time, then set off.” - Omar Khayyám

71. “Anything which is just born, which has just come into existence, has no past behind it. Birth, in other words, is the condition of having no past. And likewise, anything which now dies, which has just ceased to be, has no future left in front of it. Death is the condition of having no future. But we have already seen that this present moment has both no past and no future simultaneously. That is, birth and death are one in this present moment. This moment is just now being born—you can never find a past to this present moment, you can never find something before it. Yet also, this moment is just now dying — you can never find a future to this moment, never find something after it. This present, then, is a coincidence of opposites, a unity of birth and death, being and non-being, living and dying. As Ippen put it, "Every moment is the last moment and every moment is a rebirth.” - Ken Wilber

72. “from the Prize winning poem - UNBORN in the book Terra Affirmative."Under the surface / her body is curled, / seed of the one race, / shell of the world. // She is thw waterfall, / she is the womb, / she is the bubble, /she is the tomb. // Her hair flows upward, / blood red of the birth. / Her arms are folded / deep into the earth. // She is the fern, / she is the bark, / she is the lantern, / she is the dark. // Her eyes burn the flame / of the old and the young. / Her breath is the name / of each branch of each lung. // She is the ingredient. / She is the blend. / She is the beginning. / She is the end.” - jay woodman

73. “Look around. The hantavirus is waiting for you. Ebola and the tropical rainforest is cooking up all kinds of brews to make sure that the population is kept in control. All these things are necessary. Why is there an increase in sexual deviance right now? Because it goes against procreative sex. Mother Nature does not want more children. This is not a time of birth. It is not a time to give birth, it's a time to die. The Bible says all things under heaven and that includes death as well as life. You out there, you comfortable ones, you point the finger. You say the junkie is the problem, you say the sexual deviant, serial killer, racist, and the man who hates his fellow man is the problem. But they ain't the problem. You're the problem. The sexual deviant, the murderer, the serial killer, the taker of human life is the cure, you're the problem.” - Joe Coleman

74. “They didn’t fly out of my body, I actually had to push the little fuckers out.” - Sonia Clement on Tegan and Sara

75. “Just like a human foetus, while in the uterus, retrieves and assimilates the components that allow its physical body to become whole and fit to emerge into the outer reality, the third dimension serves the purpose of shamanic pregnancy, which is about retrieving and integrating the fragmented pieces of the soul, finally giving birth to the multidimensional self.” - Franco Santoro

76. “I can see her, chin to chest, straining to push Junior out, and Junior snagging on her insides, grabbing hold of what he caught on to try to stay inside her, but instead he pulled it out with him when he was born.” - Jesmyn Ward

77. “Maybe attraction was aligned in heaven before our birth because there was no other way to explain my feelings. There were millions of boys on the earth. Why did it feel so strong?” - Belinda Jeffrey

78. “The two moments are much alike: birth and death are made of the same fabric.” - Isabel Allende

79. “Time is a river sweeping away all that is born towards the darkest shore.” - Félix J. Palma

80. “A gardin is where you can find a whole spectrum of life, birth and death” - Tiffany Baker

81. “At the wondrous moment you were born, as you took your first breath, a great celebration was held in the heavens and twelve magnificent gifts were granted to you.” - Charlene Costanzo

82. “She gave me money to buy condoms, and instead I bought a book of baby names. That’s life. That’s love. That’s fiscally irresponsible.
” - Dark Jar Tin Zoo

83. “Marquez was not born in Colombia.He was born in Macondo, And his Macondo is his La Mancha.” - Dejan Stojanovic

84. “Quixote shines from Lorca and Picasso, From Dalí and El Greco, From the gloomy 'View of Toledo.' He was born before Cervantes.” - Dejan Stojanovic

85. “As Miriam released my hand I felt that she and Midwife Bell had returned to a more primitive world, where men never intruded and even their role in conception was unknown. Here the chain of life was mother to daughter, daughter to mother. Fathers and sons belonged in the shadows with the dogs and livestock, like the retriever growling at Midwife Bell's unfamiliar car from the window of my neighbours' living room.” - J.G. Ballard

86. “And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.” - Vladimir Nabokov

87. “Ne scapă mereu câte ceva în viaţă, de aceea trebuie să ne naştem mereu.” - Marin Sorescu

88. “They say you can take someone who was born in Africa out of the bush but you can't take the bush out of someone born there....” - Lindsay Armstrong

89. “Agitation gives birth to creation.” - Terry Tempest Williams

90. “A shadow is never created in darkness. It is born of light. We can be blind to it and blinded by it. Our shadow asks us to look at what we don’t want to see” - Terry Tempest Williams