Fathers Quotes and Sayings

Fathers Quotes

My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, "You’re tearing up the grass." "We’re not raising grass," Dad would reply. "We’re raising boys." ~Harmon Killebrew

He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it. ~Clarence Budington Kelland

A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty. ~Author Unknown

Father! — to God himself we cannot give a holier name. ~William Wordsworth

Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other. ~Joseph Joubert

One father is more than a hundred Schoolemasters. ~George Herbert, Outlandish Proverbs, 1640

Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father! ~Lydia M. Child, Philothea: A Romance, 1836

Henry James once defined life as that predicament which precedes death, and certainly nobody owes you a debt of honor or gratitude for getting him into that predicament. But a child does owe his father a debt, if Dad, having gotten him into this peck of trouble, takes off his coat and buckles down to the job of showing his son how best to crash through it. ~Clarence Budington Kelland

A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again. ~Enid Bagnold

Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance. ~Ruth E. Renkel

A father carries pictures where his money used to be. ~Author Unknown

The father who would taste the essence of his fatherhood must turn back from the plane of his experience, take with him the fruits of his journey and begin again beside his child, marching step by step over the same old road. ~Angelo Patri

My father, when he went, made my childhood a gift of a half a century. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

It is much easier to become a father than to be one. ~Kent Nerburn, Letters to My Son: Reflections on Becoming a Man, 1994

The words that a father speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not heard by the world, but, as in whispering-galleries, they are clearly heard at the end and by posterity. ~Jean Paul Richter

Any man can be a father. It takes someone special to be a dad. ~Author Unknown

The greatest gift I ever had

Came from God; I call him Dad!

~Author Unknown

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom. ~Umberto Eco

I am not ashamed to say that no man I ever met was my father’s equal, and I never loved any other man as much. ~Hedy Lamarr

The heart of a father is the masterpiece of nature. ~Antoine-François, Abbé Prévost d’Exiles

The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, "Daddy, I need to ask you something," he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan. ~Garrison Keillor

I love my father as the stars — he’s a bright shining example and a happy twinkling in my heart. ~Terri Guillemets

Two little girls, on their way home from Sunday school, were solemnly discussing the lesson. "Do you believe there is a devil?" asked one. "No," said the other promptly. "It’s like Santa Claus: it’s your father." ~Nebelspalter (Zurich, Switzerland), quoted in The Literary Digest, Vol.106, 1930

 

   

 

Dad, your guiding hand on my shoulder will remain with me forever. ~Author Unknown

My daddy, he was somewhere between God and John Wayne. ~Hank Williams, Jr.

Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. ~Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

Old as she was, she still missed her daddy sometimes. ~Gloria Naylor

You will find that if you really try to be a father, your child will meet you halfway. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com

Sons are for fathers the twice-told tale. ~Victoria Secunda, Women and Their Fathers, 1992

The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat. ~Robert Frost

Why are men reluctant to become fathers? They aren’t through being children. ~Cindy Garner

Being a great father is like shaving. No matter how good you shaved today, you have to do it again tomorrow. ~Reed Markham

Fathers represent another way of looking at life — the possibility of an alternative dialogue. ~Louise J. Kaplan, Oneness and Separateness: From Infant to Individual, 1978

There’s something like a line of gold thread running through a man’s words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself. ~John Gregory Brown, Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, 1994

I killed the monsters. That's what fathers do. ~F.K. Wallace, Stormfront, 2011

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it. ~Quentin Crisp

There are three stages of a man’s life: He believes in Santa Claus, he doesn’t believe in Santa Claus, he is Santa Claus. ~Author Unknown

Be a dad. Don’t be "Mom’s Assistant".... Be a man.... Fathers have skills that they never use at home. You run a landscaping business and you can’t dress and feed a four-year-old? Take it on. Spend time with your kids.... It won’t take away your manhood, it will give it to you. ~Louis C.K.

Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope. ~Bill Cosby

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years. ~Author unknown, commonly attributed to Mark Twain but no evidence has yet been found for this