Father Quotations

A father is a man who expects his son to be as good a man as he meant to be.

How sad to see a father with money and no joy. The man studied economics, but never studied happiness.

My father was a golden boy from a very small town. He won a very prestigious law scholarship to NYU Law School, and there in Greenwich Village, he met my mother, who was very young, fresh off the boat from Germany.

Christmas is taken very seriously in this household. I believe in Father Christmas, and there's no way I'd do anything to undermine that belief.

What I learned from my father is to think big.

I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.

I met Leo Fender, who is the guru of all amplifiers, and he gave me a Stratocaster. He became a second father to me.

My father was the guy on the block who said hi to everyone.

My parents lived a modest life, and their main concern was the education of their children. My father was a self-taught man but had a great intellectual curiosity, not only for biblical and talmudic texts, but also for philosophy, psychoanalysis and history.

'Hard Hit,' a YA collection of poems, explores the country of grief and survival. Mark, a 16-year-old boy and skilled pitcher, must confront the coming death of his beloved father with the help of his friends, family, baseball, and an idiosyncratic belief in God. I used my own experience of my parents' deaths to inform this journey.

My father has fair skin, and my mother is dark, and I'm kind of cafe au lait.

Genetically, I have tons of musical background in my life. My mother's father was a famous Weimar-era composer, Ernst Toch. My father's mother was the head of the Vienna Conservatory's piano department. It all canceled out in my case. I'm completely hopeless in music.

Not every father gets a chance to start his son off in his own footsteps.

When I was 5, my father was very much my hero. And he ran for political office in a very thankless campaign for a very thankless position. And he did it because his mother had instilled in him, if you are someone who has the capacity to make a great change, you have the responsibility.

My father was short for a man, with a child's plaything for a name - Spinner. He had flawless dark brown skin and a head full of big, wet-looking curls, black as oil. And he had the smile of a scoundrel - the kind of smile that disarmed men and undressed women.

I inherited my father's insatiable desire to meet all the beautiful girls in the world.

He never admitted anything, even on his deathbed. He was a deluded liar. If it weren't for my father, I don't think I would be so open. So that's a huge blessing.

Across the board, from my mother to my father to my aunts and uncles, everybody has always given me a lot of love.

There's really no point in having children if you're not going to be home enough to father them.

I'd love to romance Aishwarya Rai. But I'm 58 now. So I have to play her father.

I had no particular desire to be a personality like my father, nor was I equipped to be one. I was determined to be my own man, although having the Fairbanks name did make it easier to get into an office to see someone.

I feel that through my father's music I've found my own voice in my own playing.

I never had a speech from my father 'this is what you must do or shouldn't do' but I just learned to be led by example. My father wasn't perfect.

My dad always said, 'Don't worry what people think, because you can't change it.'

I was one of those children forced into fighting at the age of 13, in my country Sierra Leone, a war that claimed the lives of my mother, father and two brothers. I know too well the emotional, psychological and physical burden that comes with being exposed to violence as a child or at any age for that matter.

In our town there was a Gestapo officer who loved to play chess. After the occupation began, he found out that my father was the chess master of the region, and so he had him to his house every night.

My parents were children during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it scarred them. Especially my father, who saw destitution in his Brooklyn, New York neighborhood; adults standing in so called 'bread lines,' children begging in the streets.

My dad is my best friend, my father, and my boss. When I do something that is exciting and he likes it, it feels three times as good as you can imagine.

One interviewer asked me: 'How do you feel that you've betrayed your father?' That wasn't really very cool.

My father is actually a quarry man - he deals in stone. He also at one point had a lot of sheep, he owned a sheep farm, but primarily the family business was in stone.

I come from a family that has been here for almost 200 years. My ancestors started a very dangerous gunpowder business in 1802, and my great- grandfather and his father were both killed in gunpowder explosions.

My father, he was like the rock, the guy you went to with every problem.

My father came from Germany. My mom came from Venezuela. My father's culturally German, but his father was Japanese.

My father was a lawyer and to my best knowledge nobody in my family before had interest in science.

What my father especially taught me was to not always take the safe road, the easy road. If you are going to do good work, you have to risk failing badly.

I look at my father. He is one of my heroes. He is such an incredible, classy man. He was such a great father and such a great husband in so many ways, and we lived through some pretty tough times losing my mom. When I see all that he did, I think, Wow, thats a really wonderful man.

Although raised on the farm - my grandfather was an unsuccessful fundamentalist preacher turned farmer - my father and his brother both became professors.

If I was in love with someone, I would get their picture out of the school yearbook and do portraits. If I was curious about sex, I would draw pictures of it. There were no books for me to look at. Then I would go find my father's matches to burn the paper

My father left Nazi Germany a year after Dr. Kissinger, and so in my household he was very much an icon. He was a kind of immigrant success story, a refugee success story.

My parents were very volatile but very loving. My father would get jealous if my mother looked at somebody. I used to be insanely jealous. It comes out of insecurity. It can come and go, but you get to the point in life where you don't have this raging jealousy and protectiveness about your world.

But in its final creation it was not the part of the Father's power to fail as though exhausted. It was not the part of His wisdom to waver in a needful matter through poverty of counsel.

My father was in the civil service. I can remember standing in a bus shelter in the pouring rain, and that we were allowed candy floss at the end of the holiday if we had behaved.

I know that I will never find my father in any other man who comes into my life, because it is a void in my life that can only be filled by him.

To be a good father and mother requires that the parents defer many of their own needs and desires in favor of the needs of their children. As a consequence of this sacrifice, conscientious parents develop a nobility of character.

I'm really into antiques. But really into it because of my father, who got me into them in the first place. He's an interior designer and he's really into going to antique shows and getting up really early on Sundays and driving out to these weird little towns north of Hamilton.

My father was a diplomatic officer. As a diplomat's daughter, you have to learn to present yourself very early on.

We are each one on a road going toward home, but we're not trying to get there for Christmas. We're trying to get there for eternity. We want to arrive home safely to our loving Father in Heaven. He wants us to make it safely there, so He has sent a guiding light for us to follow: a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, the perfect example.

You can go to the Internet and know more than your mom in two seconds. It's crazy how fast teenagers have knowledge and information these days. So, I think it's harder to say, 'Your father and I know more than you.

The male role models I had all seemed to have been in the military. My father served in the army. My uncle was in the Marine Corps. Both of my grandfathers served in WWII. There weren't any career soldiers in my family, but when I was young it seemed like a way of arriving at adulthood.

I was brought up in a very religious household and did a lot of praying throughout a big part of my life and always thought of God as being not only a powerful father figure and the ruler of all time and dimension but also as a friend with whom I could chat and ask questions to and get advice from.

My mother and father had so many ups and downs and stayed with each other and helped each other. My mother took in ironing and she was a waitress. My father was working in the factory and he did people's tax returns.

Because of my father, we are that Shining City on a Hill.

I once said to my father, when I was a boy, 'Dad we need a third political party.' He said to me, 'I'll settle for a second.'

My father was a poor man, very poor in a British colonial possession where class and race were very important.

To me, having kids is the ultimate job in life. I want to be most successful at being a good father.

My father was strict and always taught me, no matter who it is, everybody is an uncle. To me, everybody was someone I respect like family. I grew up with that.

We should all aspire in life to do a multitude of things well - to be a great father, to be a good husband, to be a good lover, you know, to try to do things the best you can is very important to me.

My father and I had a good relationship, it was very relaxed. He had a lot of humour. He looked a little bit like me, although he had no beard. He had the appearance of a very elegant British-looking man.

I attended Sunday School and then church with my father and mother throughout my childhood.

Children that are raised in a home with a married mother and father consistently do better in every measure of well-being than their peers who come from divorced or step-parent, single-parent, cohabiting homes.

In reality the world is as full of bad mothers as it is of bad fathers, and it is not the motherless children who become delinquent but the fatherless ones.

My wife - to-be and I went to see my father. Only he could answer the two questions before us: Shall we get married now? Shall I begin the practice of law, or continue being the successful wine salesman I had become, working my way through law school?

This is the price you pay for having a great father. You get the wonder, the joy, the tender moments - and you get the tears at the end, too.

When I was a kid, I used to imagine animals running under my bed. I told my dad, and he solved the problem quickly. He cut the legs off the bed.

When he was twenty-three or twenty-four my father began to learn German and read philosophy in his spare hours, which did not look as though he were destined to remain long on board ship!

My father taught me how to substitute realities.

One of the things that made me persist in the Antarctic in the face of sickening discouragements was my determination to name a portion of the earth's surface after my father.

In terms of style I typically veer toward a certain masculinity. My style inspirations range from images of my father in his 1970s suits, to Tilda Swinton, to Hugh Hefner, to Sharon Stone and her ferocious sexuality, to handsome men I see on the streets of New York.

Therefore we examine with considerable diligence the consensus of the true, learned, and purer antiquity, and we love and praise the testimonies of the fathers which agree with the Scripture.

True maturity is only reached when a man realizes he has become a father figure to his girlfriends' boyfriend - and he accepts it

I was the youngest of nine siblings... I lost my father when I was just 13. For me, the elders have been my gods.

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow! Praise Him, all creatures here below! Praise Him above, ye heavenly host! Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!

At 20, I realized that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role as conceived by my father and asked him permission to engage in a professional career. In eight months I filled my gaps in Latin, Greek and mathematics, graduated from high school, and entered medical school in Turin.

I don't write from dreams because I don't remember mine, but I had a fragment of an image left about twins, whose father was telling them how their lives were going to go for the next eight years. I wrote a scene about that, and then another and then another and then another, and after five months I had 732 pages.

Being a father to my family and a husband is to me much more important than what I did in the business.

We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal

I want to be a dad, first and foremost. I want to be a good father. I've spent so much of my life on the move and travelling around the world that just to set up a home for my family and be a good dad is something that motivates me.

As a father, physician and nurse, I have a special place in my heart for children, and I know the brief window of opportunity we have to teach them simple lessons that can lead to a lifetime of good health.

From my fathers point of view, without a thought for self, a true patriot stands up against the stones of condemnation and speaks for those who are given no real voice in the halls of justice or the halls of government.

I come from a really big family, my father was a businessman and what he always instilled in us was to be your own boss. My father built up his business, and he was by no means a rich man, but he figured out how to work four-and-a-half days a week.

I am what I am thanks to my mother, my father, my brother, my sister... because they have given me everything. The education I have is thanks to them.

When I was five my parents bought me a ukulele for Christmas. I quickly learned how to play it with my father's guidance. Thereafter, my father regularly taught me all the good old fashioned songs.

Interactions between fathers and children are the starting point of education.

Becoming a father increases your capacity for love and your level of patience. It opens up another door in a person - a door which you may not even have known was there. That's what I feel with my son. There's suddenly another level of love that expands. My son is my greatest joy, out of everything in my life.

I grew up in Hollywood during WWII, and my mother was afraid that my father was going to be drafted because she didn't think we were going to be able to live on army pay. She didn't want to have to get a job, so she decided to put me to work, and that's how I got started in the movies.

The anger that Uncle Junior has comes from my background. My father was the son of an Italian immigrant, and I've seen the fire of the Italian temperament. It can be explosive sometimes in ways that are both funny and tragic.

I haven't done a lot of things in my career that my kids can watch, because they are 8, 6 and 3, and they are pretty young; so given the concepts that the film was about a superhero, it was a black superhero, and it was a father and son type partnership.

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.

As my father used to tell me, the only true sign of success in life is being able to do for a living that which makes you happy.

Being a father makes everything in the world make sense.

I believe that an artist working for and representing the Kingdom of God should do the best of their ability to show and prove the depth, life, newness, creativity, truth and excitement of their Heavenly Father through the work that is set before them.

I would also like to thank my father who discouraged me from playing the violin at an early age.

My mother's father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay's 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I'd be Horatius keeping the bridge.

I grew up in a very strong, nuclear family. My father was a sportsman. He represented South Africa in a couple of sports, so he was a very positive person and someone who encouraged you to be your best and give your best with everything that you do.

I try to live my life like my father lives his. He always takes care of everyone else first. He won't even start eating until he's sure everyone else in the family has started eating. Another thing: My dad never judges me by whether I win or lose.

With a diplomat father, for whom foreign postings were a fact of life, my siblings and I were expected to attend boarding schools in Britain.

My father died in 1930, but if you told him or anybody almost in that time that you'd be able to sit back in England and watch a cricket game in Australia, they'd have you put in the loony bin.

My only real contact with what my father did was that he could get 16-millimeter prints, so every weekend we would show two or three movies at home. But our house wasn't frequented by stars. My father's personal life was his personal life, and it was separate from his professional life.

I grew up in Muenchen where my father has been a professor for pharmaceutic chemistry at the university. He had studied chemistry and medicine, having been a research student in Leipzig with Wilhelm Ostwald, the Nobel Laureate 1909. So I became familiar with the life of a scientist in a chemical laboratory quite early.

He was definitely a father figure for all of us. Once you were a Giant, you were always a Giant.