Fatherhood Quotes

Make me the father, O Lord, who will show my sons enough of a sense of humor, so that they will always be serious, but never take themselves too seriously. Give them humility, so they will always remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.

Incidentally, I have also learned a bit about the importance of avoiding feminine embarrassment ('Daddy,' wrote Sophia when she enrolled at the New School where I teach, 'people will ask "why is old Christopher Hitchens kissing that girl?"') and shall now cease and desist.

You know you are getting old when yesterday turns out to be a fading memory you have difficulties recollecting, when today becomes a challenge that is hard to grasp and when tomorrow promises an uncertainty that you dread encountering.

A father has to be a provider, a teacher, a role model, but most importantly, a distant authority figure who can never be pleased. Otherwise, how will children ever understand the concept of God?

A ‘good’ father will tenderly cultivate his children. But a ‘good’ father who is also a ‘brave’ father will let the children without cultivate the child within.

A father is a man who fails every day.

The greatest investment you can do in your life is in gaining time.

80There is no greater influence in the lives of your children than the words you speak over them. The blessing of the father is incredibly potent and powerful. Your words give your children potential. As their father, you are prophesying their future!

The promises you speak over your children can take on the weight of destiny.

Too many times I'd left him reaching for me, from a babysitter's arms. "Am I still a mother?" I asked myself... What parts of the day could I cut out and still give him enough? Paul never asked himself that. He thought he was a great dad.

The gangs filled a void in society, and the void was the absence of family life. The gang became a family. For some of those guys in the gang that was the only family they knew, because when their mothers had them they were too busy having children for other men. Some of them never knew their daddies. Their daddies never look back after they got their mothers pregnant, and those guys just grew up and they couldn’t relate to nobody. tWhen they had their problems, who could they have talked to? Nobody would listen, so they gravitated together and form a gang. George Mackey, the former representative for the historic Fox Hill community in The Bahamas.

Many women to whom I have preached the doctrine of freedom have weakly replied, 'But who is to support the children?' It seems to me that if the marriage ceremony is needed as a protection to insure the enforced support of children, then you are marrying a man who, you suspect, would under certain conditions, refuse to support his children, and it is a pretty low-down proposition. For you are marrying a man whom you already suspect of being a villain. But I have not so poor an opinion of men that I believe the greater percentage of them to be such low specimens of humanity.

Implicit [in the psychiatric literature] is a set of normative assumptions regarding the father's prerogatives and the mother's obligations within the family, The father, like the children, is presumed to be entitled to the mother's love, nurturance, and care. In fact, his dependent needs actually supersede those of the children, for if a mother falls to provide the accustomed intentions, it is taken for granted that some other female must be found to take her place. The oldest daughter is a frequent choice... The father's wish, indeed his right, to continue to receive female nurturance, whatever the circumstances, is accepted without question.

A father is only capable of giving what he has, and what he knows. A good father gives all of himself that is good.

Fathers are no longer men, most are only boys who pretend.

My son, there may be a time when I explain these things to you, because there may be a time when I understand them.

He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.

Behind every great man is a man greater, his father.

Saturday mornings, I’ve learned, are a great opportunity for kids to sneak into your bed, fall back asleep, and kick you in the face.

There’s a wound most troubled boys share, which, at its core, comes from the feeling that they don’t have their father’s unconditional love.

We never get over our fathers, and we’re not required to. (Irish Proverb)

How can you be a 'Former-Father'? Is it possible to be a father but, because someone or something is determined to illegalize it, being a father becomes a thing of the past? Should you simply consign yourself to be effectively dead to your living children; as though the fact of being their father has somehow been terminated, nullified or otherwise, deemed non-existent? I believe the basic answer to be 'No!

Real Fathers are men of integrity & honour. Their word is their bond.

He was not at all what is called ‘a character’. He was an innocent, affable old man who had somehow preserved his good humor – much more than that, a mysterious and tranquil joy – throughout a life which to all outward observation had been overloaded with misfortune. He had like many another been born in full sunlight and lived to see night fall.

Do you suppose, gentlemen, that our children as they grow up and begin to reason can avoid such questions? No, they cannot, and we will not impose on them an impossible restriction. The sight of an unworthy father involuntarily suggests tormenting questions to a young creature, especially when he compares him with the excellent fathers of his companions. The conventional answer to this question is: 'He begot you, and you are his flesh and blood, and therefore you are bound to love him.' The youth involuntarily reflects: 'But did he love me when he begot me?' he asks, wondering more and more. 'Was it for my sake he begot me? He did not know me, not even my sex, at that moment, at the moment of passion, perhaps, inflamed by wine, and he has only transmitted to me a propensity to drunkenness- that's all he's done for me.... Why am I bound to love him simply for begetting me when he has cared nothing for me all my life after?Oh, perhaps those questions strike you as coarse and cruel, but do not expect an impossible restraint from a young mind. 'Drive nature out of the door and it will fly in at the window'.

As a Father, I willingly nurture & protect the Soul's of all those - I love.

It’s time to stop dreaming about who you want your son to be and help him become the healthy, happy, and successful man he’s supposed to be.

Real Fathers are Solution Providers and not a part of the problem to be solved.

As fathers, we should have a desire to be active participants in our children’s lives.

I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy's notion of his father.

Many Christians have no understanding of God’s fatherhood

A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, 'Everything is possible again.' It was the perfect thing to write because that was exactly how it felt.

it's my responsibility to cultivate the man in my son. I can't be passive about that.

The task of being right is a task the father perfects over time.

He tried to disguise how tired and ill he was, how depressing the thought of death was to him and how he spent his days and nights thinking up schemes of living beyond what the prognosis said. His hope, if not his heart, would find a way.

Their lifelong love of learning, their remarkable wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was fostered primarily by their father. He read aloud to them at night, eliciting their responses to works of history and literature. He organized amateur plays for them, encourage pursuit of special interests, prompted them to write essays on their readings, and urge them to recite poetry.

You can’t say you love man as an individual if you have not dealt with the person’s complex personality, his or her unfamiliar habits, disturbing impulses and biological makeup.

I was once, I am, and I will always be my children’s father. As to those individuals who have tried so desperately to destroy the fact, I offer forgiveness and seekreconciliation. As to the institutions that have supported the effort to destroy the fact, I pray that: Lady Justice will seek the truth rather than excuse it; and that she will extol the American family rather than destroy it.

What is less often noticed is that it is precisely the kind of moral instruction that parents are constantly trying to give their children — concrete, imaginative, teaching general principles from particular instances, and seeking all the time to bring the children to appreciate and share the parent's own attitudes and view of life… The all-embracing principles of conduct

What a face this girl possessed!—Could I neither die then nor gaze at her face every day, I would need to recreate it through painting or sculpture, or through fatherhood, until a second such face could be born.

Beautiful is the man who leaves a legacy that of shared love and life. It is he who transfers meaning, assigns significance and conveys in his loving touch the fine art and gentle shaping of a life. This man shall be called, Father.

Passion stimulates you, love intoxicates you, marriage sobers you, and parenthood tries you.

It's not like you're becoming a born-again Christian or teetotal or an accountant or something you can stop being after a while. You'll never not be a father now.''It feels great, Rob' he said. 'Just great.

You cannot begin to understand the failure of marriage—or the living of these ideas commitment or covenant—without considering and factoring in the devaluing of fatherhood. The two are inextricably linked and dependent.

When kids made a decision for themselves they have a vested interest in showing they were right. Lee wanted to prove to me that he had made the right choice so he worked hard and did well. If we'd forced him to go to college somewhere else all the incentives would've been different. Then he would have had a motive to prove that we were wrong.

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.

Why do we complicate life, when it was meant to be very simple?

Not a few millions of parents strongly hope that their own children will step in by instantly becoming their own parents’ foster parents, if and when the parents reach their second childhood.

Do whatever you must do to protect your children and wife.

Unsettling emotions are capable of messing up the most beautiful minds in this world.

He was fortified by a memory which kept only the good things and rejected the ill. Despite his sorrows, he had had a fair share of joys and these were ever fresh and accessible.

In his sovereignty, God looked down through history and specifically chose you to be the father of your child. He decided no one else could raise that boy or girl better than you. In all of history, there were no other guys better equipped to lead our children through this wilderness than you and I could. He’s put a lot of faith in us and he’s the ultimate strategic planner.

- Daddy won’t buy me a new pony, so I’m gonna burn my old one so he will have to buy me a new one. - Will a horse do? I'm a horse. I'm a horse. Yes, of course. Yes, of course. (That's a little children's poem.).-Jarod Kintz and Stefan D

Well, there is a piece of famous advice, grand advice even if it is German, to forget what you can't bear. The strong can forget, can shut out history. Very good. Even if it is self-flattery to speak of strength--these aesthetic philosophers, they take a posture, but power sweeps postures away. Still, it's true you can't go on transposing one nightmare into another, Nietzsche was certainly right about that. The tender-minded must harden themselves. Is this world nothing but a barren lump of coke? No, no, but what sometimes seems a system of prevention, a denial of what every human being knows. I love my children, but I am the world to them, and bring them nightmares. I had this child by my enemy. And I love her. The sight of her, the odor of her hair, this minute, makes me tremble with love. Isn't it mysterious how I love the child of my enemy? But a man doesn't need happiness for himself. No, he can put up with any amount of torment--with recollections, with his own familiar evils, despair. And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.

Original sin is not only the violation of a positive command … but … attempts … to abolish fatherhood, destroying its rays which permeate the created world, placing in doubt the truth about God who is Love and leaving man with only a sense of the master-slave relationship.

For me, it’s not just about blessing my generation, I've done that already, I also have to be a father to the fatherless.

Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind a woman with no child could only be explained by vast untrammeled calamity. Maybe she just doesn't like children.Nobody likes children, Yunior, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.

Men were often far different in their roles as fathers than they were as suitors, the memories of which kept them, out of necessity, both vigilant and violent, and even in tender moments, to their daughters.

We're constantly judging and grading other parents, just to make sure that they aren't any better than us. I'm as guilty as anyone. I see some lady hand her kid a Nintendo DS at the supermarket and I instantly downgrade that lady to Shitty Parent status. I feel pressure to live up to a parental ideal that no one probably has ever achieved. I feel pressure to raise a group of human beings that will help America kick the shit out of Finland and South Korea in the world math rankings. I feel pressure to shield my kids from the trillion pages of hentai donkey porn out there on the Internet. I feel pressure to make the insane amounts of money needed for a supposedly 'middle-class' upbringing for the kids, an upbringing that includes a house and college tuition and health care and so many other expenses that you have to be a multimillionaire to afford it. PRESSURE PRESSURE PRESSURE.

A father knows his child's heart, as only a child can know his fathers.