This Father’s Day, celebrate fatherhood with meaningful
quotes that will change the way you think of your dad.
Alexander Pope: We think our fathers
fools, so wise we grow. Our wiser sons, no doubt will think us so.
Anonymous: Small boys become big men
through the influence of big men who care about small boys.
Anonymous: The greatest gift I ever had came from God, and I call him Dad!
Anonymous: One night a father
overheard his son pray: Dear God, Make me the kind of man my Daddy is. Later
that night, the Father prayed, Dear God, Make me the kind of man my son wants
me to be.
Anne Sexton: It doesn’t matter who
my father was; it matters who I remember he was.
Bill Cosby: Fatherhood is pretending
the present you love most is “soap-on-a-rope.”
Charles Wadworth: By the time a man
realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s
wrong.
Chinese Proverb: If a son is
uneducated, his dad is to blame.
Clarence Budington Kelland: 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: He
didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.
Confucius: The father who does not
teach his son his duties is equally guilty with the son who neglects them.
Croesus: In peace the sons bury
their fathers, but in war the fathers bury their sons.
Douglas Macarthur: By profession I
am a soldier and take pride in that fact. But I am prouder – infinitely prouder
– to be a father. A soldier destroys in order to build; the father only builds,
never destroys. The one has the potentiality of death; the other embodies
creation and life. And while the hordes of death are mighty, the battalions of
life are mightier still. It is my hope that my son, when I am gone, will
remember me not from the battle field but in the home repeating with him our
simple daily prayer, ‘Our Father who art in Heaven.’
Erika Cosby: You know… fathers
just have a way of putting everything together.
Euripides: To a father growing old
nothing is dearer than a daughter.
Euripides: Noble fathers have noble
children.
Euripides: Lucky that man whose
children make his happiness in life and not his grief, the anguished
disappointment of his hopes.
Fanny Fern: To her the name of
father was another name for love.
George Herbert: One father is more
than a hundred schoolmasters.
Harry S Truman: I have found the
best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then
advise them to do it.
Imelda Marcos: I have never been a
material girl. My father always told me never to love anything that cannot love
you back.
Jan Hutchins: When I was a kid, my
father told me every day, ‘You’re the most wonderful boy in the world, and you
can do anything you want to.’
J. August Strindberg: That is the
thankless position of the father in the family… the provider for all, and the
enemy of all.
Jean de La Fontaine: It is impossible
to please all the world and one’s father.
Jewish Proverb: When a father gives
to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.
John Gregory Brown, Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery: 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.
Josefowitz: My father died many
years ago, and yet when something special happens to me, I talk to him secretly
not really knowing whether he hears, but it makes me feel better to half
believe it.
Joseph Joubert: Children have more
need of models than critics.
Kent Nerburn: Until you have a son
of your own… you will never know the joy, the love beyond feeling that
resonates in the heart of a father as he looks upon his son. You will never
know the sense of honor that makes a man want to be more than he is and to pass
something good and hopeful into the hands of his son. And you will never know
the heartbreak of the fathers who are haunted by the personal demons that keep
them from being the men they want their sons to be.
Kent Nerburn: It is much easier to
become a father than to be one.
Knights of Pythagoras: A man never
stands as tall as when he kneels to help a child.
Lydia M. Child: Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices
call him father!
Marcelene Cox: Parents are often so
busy with the physical rearing of children that they miss the glory of
parenthood, just as the grandeur of the trees is lost when raking leaves.
Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eyes: All fathers are invisible in daytime; daytime is
ruled by mothers and fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home fathers,
with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to fathers than meets the
eye.
Mario Cuomo: I watched a small man
with thick calluses on both hands work fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I saw
him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here
uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to
know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.
Mario Cuomo: I talk and talk and
talk, and I haven’t taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example
in one week.
Margaret Courtney: Be kind to thy
father, for when thou were young, who loved thee so fondly as he? He caught the
first accents that fell from thy tongue, and joined in thy innocent glee.
Margaret Truman: It’s only when you
grow up, and step back from him, or leave him for your own career and your own
home – it’s only then that you can measure his greatness and fully appreciate
it. Pride reinforces love.
Mark Twain, Old Times on the Mississippi: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.
National Urban League Slogan: Don’t
make a baby if you can’t be a father.
Nat King Cole: I felt something
impossible for me to explain in words. Then, when they took her away, it hit
me. I got scared all over again and began to feel giddy. Then it came to me…
I was a father.
Queen Victoriaof England:None of you can ever be proud enough of being the child of such a Father
who has not his equal in this world – so great, so good, so faultless. Try, all
of you, to follow in his footsteps and don’t be discouraged, for to be really
in everything like him none of you, I am sure, will ever be. Try, therefore, to
be like him in some points, and you will have acquired a great deal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, on the death of his
son: My son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, had ended
his earthly life. You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much
of me such a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a
very rich man, and now the poorest of all.
Richard Henry Dana: Better to be
driven out from among men than to be disliked of children.
Robert Burton; Anatomy of Melancholy: Diogenes struck the father when the son
swore.
Robert Frost: The father is always a
Republican toward his son, and his mother’s always a democrat.
Samuel Johnson: There must always be
a struggle between a father and son, while one aims at power and the other at
independence.
Sigmund Freud: I cannot think of any
need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.
Sir Stephen Spender: When a child,
my dreams rode on your wishes, I was your son, high on your horse, my mind a
top whipped by the lashes of your rhetoric, windy of course.
Stanley T. Banks, Father of the Bride: You fathers will understand. You have a
little girl. She looks up to you. You’re her oracle. You’re her hero. And then
the day comes when she gets her first permanent wave and goes to her first real
party, and from that day on, you’re in a constant state of panic.
Stanley T. Banks, Father of the Bride: “Who giveth this woman?” This
woman. But she’s not a woman. She’s still a child. And she’s leaving us. What’s
it going to be like to come home and not find her? Not to hear her voice
calling, “Hi, Pops” as I come in? I suddenly realized what I was
doing. I was giving up Kay. Something inside me began to hurt.
Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities: 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.
William Penn: He who is taught to
live upon little owes more to his father’s wisdom than he who has a great deal
left him does to his father’s care.
Funny Fathers Day Quotes –
Ernest Hemingway: To be a successful father, there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.
Peter De Vries: My father hated radio and he could not wait for television to be invented so that he could hate that too.
Robert Orben: Life was a lot simpler when what we honored was father and mother rather than all major credit cards.
Fatherhood Advice Quotes –
Henry Ward Beecher: The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
David Gottesman: Fathers, like mothers, are not born. Men grow into fathers and fathering is a very important stage in their development.
Bill Cosby:If the new American father feels bewildered and even defeated, let him take comfort from the fact that whatever he does in any fathering situation has a fifty percent chance of being right.
Read some more Insightful Father’s Day Quotes. Know more about Fathers Day.