Father Quotes, Sayings Thought about Dad, Daddy, Fathers

My Father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person: He believed in me. ~ Jim Valvano

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

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

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