Quotations about Fathers

Picture : A 19th century depiction of Father Time, cradling Baby New Year.

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


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 Schoolmasters. ~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


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." ~Ladies' Home Journal, quoted in 2,715 One-Line Quotations for Speakers, Writers & Raconteurs by Edward F. Murphy


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


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


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


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


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


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. ~Mark Twain, "Old Times on the Mississippi" Atlantic Monthly, 1874