To be a successful father, there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.

—Ernest Hemingway

The thing to remember about fathers is they’re men. A girl has to keep it in mind: They are dragon-seekers, bent on improbable rescues. Scratch any father, you find someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, believing change is a threat, like your first shoes with heels on, like your first bicycle.

—Phyllis McGinley

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.”

 —Helen Hayes

My father hated radio and he could not wait for television to be invented so that he could hate that too.

 —Peter DeVries

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

—William Shakespeare

It is a wise child that knows his own father.                     —Homer

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

—Sigmund Freud

I’ve had a hard life, but my hardships are nothing against the hardships that my father went through in order to get me to where I started.

—Enid Bagnold

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

—Anne Sexton

All fathers are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers and fathers come out at night.

—Margaret Atwood

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

—Robert Frost

A father is a banker provided by nature.

 —proverb