Here are some words from Bediuzzaman Said Nursi about mothers:
“Yes, man’s first master and most influential teacher is his mother. In connection with this, I shall explain the following to you, which I have always felt strongly in my own self:
I am eighty years old and have received lessons from eighty thousand people. Yet I swear that the truest and most unshakable lessons I have received are those inculcated in me by my late mother, which have always remained fresh for me. They have been planted in my nature as thought they were seeds planted in my physical being. I observe that other instruction I have received has been constructed on those seeds. That is to say, the lessons instilled in my nature and spirit by my mother when I was one year old I now see at the age of eighty to be each fundamental seeds amid great truths.
For instance, I consider it certain that I learned to be compassionate which is the most important of the four principles of my way, and to be kind and clement, which is the greatest truth of the Risale-i Nur, from the compassionate behavior and acts of my mother and from her teaching. Yes, the compassion of motherhood bears true sincerity and true self sacrifice, but not thinking of the Hereafter-a treasury of diamonds, for her innocent child- and to turn his face towards this world, which is like temporary, transient fragments of glass, and to be kind to him in that way, is to misuse that compassion.
A proof of this heroism of women in regard to compassion, which wants absolutely no recompense and nothing in return, and of their sacrificing their very spirits, which bears no meaning of personal benefit and no show, is that a hen, which bears a tiny sample of that compassion, will attack a lion and sacrifice its life for its chicks.”
From the book: The Flashes by B. Said Nursi