Father Quotes

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him — or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.

One thing is clear: The Founding Fathers never intended a nation where citizens would pay nearly half of everything they earn to the government.

I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me—that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me.

I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile because it's impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren't feeling twinkly yourself. A mouth-smile is different. You can fake a mouth-smile any time you want, simply by moving your lips. I've also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It's sure to be a phony.

Our heavenly Father has a thousand ways to provide for us, of which we know nothing.

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

There is nothing like wounded affection for giving poignancy to anger.

Father sat down on the edge of the narrow bed. "Corrie," he began gently, "when you and I go to Amsterdam-when do I give you your ticket?" I sniffed a few times, considering this. "Why, just before we get on the train." "Exactly. And our wise Father in heaven knows when we're going to need things, too. Don't run out ahead of Him, Corrie. When the time comes that some of us will have to die, you will look into your heart and find the strength you need-just in time.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

My father used to say that life is what you make it. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. You can't change the past, but the future isn't set in stone. You can effect a change there. Move forward not with hatred or love. Move forward with purpose. (Simone)

No love is greater than that of a father for His son.

The Lord gave the wonderful promise of the free use of His Name with the Father in conjunction with doing His works. The disciple who lives only for Jesus' work and Kingdom, for His will and honor, will be given the power to appropriate the promise. Anyone grasping the promise only when he wants something very special for himself will be disappointed, because he is making Jesus the servant of his own comfort. But whoever wants to pray the effective prayer of faith because he needs it for the work of the Master will learn it, because he has made himself the servant of his Lord's interests.

My answer to the racial problem in America is to not deal with it at all. The founding fathers dealt with it when they made the Constitution.

The one thing I remember about Christmas was that my father used to take me out in a boat about ten miles offshore on Christmas Day, and I used to have to swim back. Extraordinary. It was a ritual. Mind you, that wasn't the hard part. The difficult bit was getting out of the sack.

He stood staring into the wood for a minute, then said: "What is it about the English countryside — why is the beauty so much more than visual? Why does it touch one so?" He sounded faintly sad. Perhaps he finds beauty saddening — I do myself sometimes. Once when I was quite little I asked father why this was and he explained that it was due to our knowledge of beauty's evanescence, which reminds us that we ourselves shall die. Then he said I was probably too young to understand him; but I understood perfectly.

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.

It's like my father always said to me, he said to me, he said, Roseanna Roseanadana, it's always something. If it isn't one thing—it's another! It's always something.

Answered prayer is the interchange of love between the Father and His child.

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.

As for my own part I care not for death, for all men are mortal; and though I be a woman yet I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father had. I am your anointed Queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am indeed endowed with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat I were able to live in any place in Christendom.

One afternoon, when I was four years old, my father came home, and he found me in the living room in front of a roaring fire, which made him very angry. Because we didn't have a fireplace.

As a little boy of eleven I entered the Cadet Corps. I was not particularly eager to become a Cadet, but my father wished it. So my wishes were not consulted.

A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all.

But I am greedy for life. I do too much of everything all the time. Suddenly one day my heart will fail. The Iron Crab will get me as it got my father. But I am not afraid of The Crab. At least I shall have died from an honourable disease. Perhaps they will put on my tombstone. 'This Man Died from Living Too Much'.

My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is father of the Man; I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.

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

On the basis of the eternal will of God we have to think of EVERY HUMAN BEING, even the oddest, most villainous or miserable, as one to whom Jesus Christ is Brother and God is Father; and we have to deal with him on this assumption. If the other person knows that already, then we have to strengthen him in the knowledge. If he does no know it yet or no longer knows it, our business is to transmit this knowledge to him.

My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it.

The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father.

He had then warned his daughter not to violate the Eleventh Commandment. "Which one is that?" I asked her. "Do not bullshit thy father," she said.

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

She wasn't tracking down her father to learn more about him. She was tracking him down to learn more about herself.

THE FATHER: But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here? In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.

Let us keep the dance of rain our fathers kept and tread our dreams beneath the jungle sky.

Humor is always based on a modicum of truth. Have you ever heard a joke about a father-in-law?

A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again.

I learned from the example of my father that the manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing that must be endured.

What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.

The sooner I learn to forget myself in the desire that He may be glorified, the richer will be the blessing that prayer will bring to myself. No one ever loses by what he sacrifices to the Father.

I have discovered in my long life that there are many words and phrases which have more power than any spell of magick. The most well-known of these is, of course, I love you. But by far the most deadly is, if only. For these two words can strip a man's strength, his courage and his confidence. They become the father of regret and anguish and pain.

A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind.

The guys who fear becoming fathers don't understand that fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man. The end product of child-raising is not the child but the parent.

My father was my teacher. But most importantly he was a great dad.

Love is rather impotent and pitiful: My father must have told me a million times how much he loved me, but that emotion - assuming it was even real - hardly had the strength to counter the many other acts of wrong he committed against me. Contrary to romance novels and the love-conquers-all mentality that even those of us who grow up in an era of divorce are - in response to some atavistic instinct - still raised to believe, love is always a product and a victim of circumstances. It is fragile and small.

If you would have a good wife, marry one who has been a good daughter.

Sometimes you struggle so hard to feed your family one way, you forget to feed them the other way, with spiritual nourishment. Everybody needs that.

He may delay because it would not be safe to give us at once what we ask: we are not ready for it. To give ere we could truly receive, would be to destroy the very heart and hope of prayer, to cease to be our Father. The delay itself may work to bring us nearer to our help, to increase the desire, perfect the prayer, and ripen the receptive condition.

There was one thing my murderer didn't understand; he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Time is the father of truth, its mother is our mind.

My father said, Politics asks the question: Is it expedient? Vanity asks: Is it popular? But conscience asks: Is it right?

Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood. Others may decieve you - you decide what's good. You decide alone, but no one is alone. People make mistakes. Fathers, mothers, people make mistakes, holding to their own, thinking they're alone. Honor their mistakes. Fight for their mistakes. Witches can be right. Giants can be good. You decide what's right. You decide what's good.

Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.

We who have lived before railways were made belong to another world. It was only yesterday, but what a gulf between now and then! Then was the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less swift, riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, knights in armor, Norman invaders, Roman legions, Druids, Ancient Britons painted blue, and so forth — all these belong to the old period. But your railroad starts the new era, and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one. We who lived before railways, and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark.

The church is not a place where perfect people gather to say perfect things, or have perfect thoughts, or have perfect feelings. The Church is a place where imperfect people gather to provide encouragement, support, and service to each other as we press on in our journey to return to our Heavenly Father.

Nothing will surprise us more than when we get to heaven and see the Father and realize how well we know Him and how familiar His face is to us.

For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men's faces.

My father always told us that if we will let God, He can use even our disappointements, even our annoyances to bring us a blessing. There's a practical way to start the process too: by thanking HIm for whatever happens, no matter how disagreeable it seems.

Of all my father's teachings, the most enduring was the one about the true measure of a man. That true measure was how well he provided for his children, and it stuck with me as if it were etched in my brain.

When one has not had a good father, one must create one.

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

I do not wish to be a coward like the father of mankind and throw the blame upon a woman.

Be he the first to stand or the last, a man must stand," the father had told his adoring son. "And if there is only one man, then that man must stand alone." ~Thomas to Bruce Wayne

A father's suspicion...' she began. Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.' ~pg 87, Ruana Singh and Jack Salmon

Great things are wrought through simple and small things. Like the small flecks of gold that accumulate over time into a large treasure, our small and simple acts of kindness and service will accumulate into a life filled with love for Heavenly Father, devotion to the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, and a sense of peace and joy each time we reach out to one another.

He once thought it himself, that he might die with grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

And quit bringing up our forefathers and saying they were civil libertarians. Our founding fathers would have never tolerated any of this crap. For God's sake, they were blowing peoples' heads off because they put a tax on their breakfast beverage. And it wasn't even coffee.

The discussion of prayer is so great that it requires the Father to reveal it, His firstborn Word to teach it, and the Spirit to enable us to think and speak rightly of so great a subject.

I have never been a material girl. My father always told me never to love anything that cannot love you back.

Oh, it is wonderful to know that our Heavenly Father loves us"”even with all our flaws! His love is such that even should we give up on ourselves, He never will. We see ourselves in terms of yesterday and today. Our Heavenly Father sees us in terms of forever. Although we might settle for less, Heavenly Father won't, for He sees us as the glorious beings we are capable of becoming.

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.

I was raised Catholic, but my father's people were Methodist, so we went to both churches.

The Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to bare the secrets of government and inform the people.

What could I do but go with them Civil War soldiers, or work for them and my country? The patriot blood of my father was warm in my veins.

It's a wonderful feeling when your father becomes not a god but a man to you - when he comes down from the mountain and you see he's this man with weaknesses. And you love him as this whole being, not as a figurehead.

And as the elevator descents, passing the second floor, and the first floor, going even father down, I realize that the money doesn't matter. That all that does is that I want to see the worst

In Christ, for the first time, we see that in God himself there exists—within his inseparable unity—the distinction between the Father who gives and the Gift which is given (the Son), but only in the unity of the Holy Spirit.

It is a pity that instead of the Pilgrim Fathers landing on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock had not landed on the Pilgrim Fathers.

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.

I'm much more proud of being a father than being an actor.

In terms of distance, the prodigal's pigsty is the farthest point from home; in terms of time, the pigsty is the shortest distance to the father's house.

My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta. But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless.

As we look for humor, seek for the eternal perspective, understnd the principle of compensation, and draw near to our Heavenly Father, we can endure heardship and trial.

This is and has been the Father's work from the beginning-to bring us into the home of His heart.

She realized that being starved for words was the same as being starved for food, because both left a hollow place inside you, a place you needed filled to make it through another day. Rachel remembered how growing up she'd thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be. (130)

Nothing can be surprising any more or impossible or miraculous, now that Zeus, father of the Olympians has made night out of noonday, hiding the bright sunlight, and . . . fear has come upon mankind. After this, men can believe anything, expect anything. Don't any of you be surprised in future if land beasts change places with dolphins and go to live in their salty pastures, and get to like the sounding waves of the sea more than the land, while the dolphins prefer the mountains.

Jesus brooded upon the Divine imminence until at last he could declare, 'I and my Father are One.'

Treat all men alike.... give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man...free to travel... free to stop...free to work...free to choose my own teachers...free to follow the religion of my Fathers...free to think and talk and act for myself.

My father...was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings.

I don't really believe in the Devil, but if the Devil is the Father of Lies, then he certainly invented the Internet.

The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously "the people of the book." There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street.

As Daddy said, life is 95 percent anticipation.

My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening

I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father.

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.

Chess is all about getting the king into check, you see. It's about killing the father. I would say that chess has more to do with the art of murder than it does with the art of war.

It doesn't matter if it's in my class or around the world, anywhere, the first thing I say is "First of all guys, I want to give my Heavenly Father credit for all I do and the Lord Jesus Christ to give me the opportunity to go out and reach and save lives." To me, that's the most important thing.

Old as she was, she still missed her daddy sometimes.