Father Quotes

Most popular father quotes

Someone once said that every man is trying to either live up to his father's expectations or make up for his father's mistakes, and I suppose that may explain my particular malady as well as anything else. - Barack Obama quote.
Someone once said that every man is trying to either live up to his father's expectations or make up for his father's mistakes, and I suppose that may explain my particular malady as well as anything else.
Barack Obama The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

personal

A father is a banker provided by nature.
— French proverb

French proverbs proverbs European proverbs

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother. - Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh quote.
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.

parents family parenting

Making the decision to have a child—it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.

parenting family motherhood

A good father is a little bit of a mother.
One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters. - George Herbert quote.
One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.

proverbs parenting

My father didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.

parenting

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was. - Anne Sexton quote.
It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

memory

What a father says to his children is not heard by the world; but it will be heard by posterity.

parenting

There is probably no more terrible instance of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man — with human flesh. - Frank Herbert quote.
There is probably no more terrible instance of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man — with human flesh.
The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them. - Bertrand Russell quote.
The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

parenting

Many a man wishes he were strong enough to tear a telephone book in half - especially if he has a teenage daughter.

adolescence daughters

Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children. - William Penn quote.
Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children.

parents children

He may be president, but he still comes home and swipes my socks. - Joseph P. Kennedy quote.
He may be president, but he still comes home and swipes my socks.
It is a wise father that knows his own child. - William Shakespeare quote.
It is a wise father that knows his own child.

parenting

You don't raise heroes, you raise sons. And if you treat them like sons, they'll turn out to be heroes, even if it's just in your own eyes.
My father was not a failure. After all, he was the father of a president of the United States. - Harry S. Truman quote.
My father was not a failure. After all, he was the father of a president of the United States.
You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. - Robert Frost quote.
You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's.

parents

He's a great kid. He hates the same way I do. - Joseph P. Kennedy quote.
He's a great kid. He hates the same way I do.
Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid, one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.
The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat. - Robert Frost quote.
The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.

mother parents

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
— Exodus 20:12

parents mother biblical

Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father. - Gloria Steinem quote.
Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.
All fathers except mine are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers.  But fathers come out at night.  Darkness brings home the fathers with their real, unspeakable power. - Margaret Atwood quote.
All fathers except mine are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers.  But fathers come out at night.  Darkness brings home the fathers with their real, unspeakable power.
A father is always making his baby into a little woman.  And when she is a woman he turns her back again.

daughters

To her the name of father was another name for love. - Fanny Fern quote.
To her the name of father was another name for love.
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection. - Sigmund Freud quote.
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
How many of the people I know—sons and daughters—have intricate abstract expressionist paintings of their mothers, created out of their own emotions, attitudes, hands.  And how many have only Polaroid pictures of their fathers.
Today, while the titular head of the family may still be the father, everyone knows that he is little more then chairman, at most, of the entertainment committee. - Ashley Montagu quote.
Today, while the titular head of the family may still be the father, everyone knows that he is little more then chairman, at most, of the entertainment committee.
A father is very miserable who has no other hold on his children's affection than the need they have of his assistance, if that can be called affection. - Michel de Montaigne quote.
A father is very miserable who has no other hold on his children's affection than the need they have of his assistance, if that can be called affection.
You have to dig deep to bury your daddy.
— Czech proverb

proverbs

How many a father have I seen,
A sober man, among his boys,
Whose youth was full of foolish noise. - Alfred, Lord Tennyson quote.
How many a father have I seen,
A sober man, among his boys,
Whose youth was full of foolish noise.
Children want to feel instinctively that their father is behind them as solid as a mountain, but, like a mountain, is something to look up to.
Fatherhood, for me, has been less a job than an unstable and surprising combination of adventure, blindman's bluff, guerilla warfare, and crossword puzzle.
Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son. - Evelyn Waugh quote.
Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
My father, dead so long now, looms up as unexplored landscape, the mountains of the moon, a text that has lain in a drawer, undeciphered, for which I have had no Rosetta Stone.

personal

My Mother always deferred to my Father, and in his absence spoke of him to me, as if he were all-wise.  I confused him in some sense with God.
Edmund Gosse Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments

personal

My father was a romancer and most of my memories of him are colored, I fear, by an untruthfulness that I must have caught from him, like one of the colds that ran round the family. - Mary McCarthy quote.
My father was a romancer and most of my memories of him are colored, I fear, by an untruthfulness that I must have caught from him, like one of the colds that ran round the family.

personal

I stopped loving my father a long time ago.  What remained was the slavery to a pattern. - Anaïs Nin quote.
I stopped loving my father a long time ago.  What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

personal

When my father would come home from the track after a good day, the whole room would light up; it was fairyland.  But when he lost, it was black.  In our house, it was always either a wake...or a wedding. - Peter O’Toole quote.
When my father would come home from the track after a good day, the whole room would light up; it was fairyland.  But when he lost, it was black.  In our house, it was always either a wake...or a wedding.

personal

I have spent hours kicking myself for not fighting past Dad's reserve, for not going into that cave where he lived and rooting him out.
William Plummer Wishing My Father Well: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons, and Fly-Fishing

personal

All the feeling which my father could not put into words was in his hand—any dog, child or horse would recognize the kindness of it. - Freya Stark quote.
All the feeling which my father could not put into words was in his hand—any dog, child or horse would recognize the kindness of it.

personal

My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy—a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak. - Mark Twain quote.
My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy—a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak.

personal

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 the old man had learned in seven years.

personal

I took what you didn't give to me and gave it to my sons
Thank you.
Chip Webster A Passion for Life: Reflections From the Journey

personal

It's a wonderful feeling when your father becomes not a god but a man to you—when he comes down from the mountain and you see he's this man with weaknesses. And you live with him as this whole being, not as a figurehead. - Robin Williams quote.
It's a wonderful feeling when your father becomes not a god but a man to you—when he comes down from the mountain and you see he's this man with weaknesses. And you live with him as this whole being, not as a figurehead.
Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life. - Oscar Wilde quote.
Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.