Father's Day Quotations

Compiled by Elizabeth Olson

For rarely are sons similar to their fathers: most are worse, and a few are better than their fathers."

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

"When Charles first saw our child Mary, he said all the proper things for a new father. He looked upon the poor little red thing and blurted, 'She's more beautiful than the Brooklyn Bridge.'"

"I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week."

"Jarrell was not so much a father . . . as an affectionate encyclopedia."

"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."

"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."

"You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's."

"I just owe almost everything to my father [and] it's passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election."

"People see Archie Bunker everywhere. Particularly girls; poor girls, rich girls, all kinds of girls are always coming up to me and telling me that Archie is just like their dad."

"A king, realizing his incompetence, can either delegate or abdicate his duties. A father can do neither. If only sons could see the paradox, they would understand the dilemma."

"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."

Related Links

• Spring Quotations
• Quotations for Mother's Day
• Winter Quotations
• Quotations by Women
• African American Quotations