Best Father's Day Quotes - Celebrating Fatherhood

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Author: Paul Banas
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.

Buying Dad ties, power tools, ball game tickets, and other gifts for Father's Day are all acceptable ways to thank dad. We tend to go for more sentimental ideas, though writing on a poem on a card attached to a gift goes over pretty well too.

Your kids can easily write their own poems as well. Just start with "Roses are red, Violets are blue," and have them finish the rest. Even the grouchiest of dads can't resist a young child reading an ode to them. Here are a few noted Fathers Day Poems.

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About the Author
Paul Banas was looking for a business idea that would allow him the flexibility to spend time with his family. Paul Banas is a founder of GreatDad.com - a leading source of experience, recommendations, inspiration and advice for dads - delivered from the male perspective.