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.

—Marlene Deitrich

A new father quickly learns that his child invariably comes to the bathroom at precisely the times when he’s in there, as if he needed company. The only way for this father to be certain of bathroom privacy is to shave at the gas station.

—Bill Cosby

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

—Mario Cuomo

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

—Robert Frost

The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, “Daddy, I need to ask you something,” he’s a pat of butter in a hot frying pan.

—Garrison Keillor

There’s something like a line of gold thread running through a man’s words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself.

—John Gregory Brown

A father is a banker provided by nature.               —French proverb

By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong.

—Charles Wadsworth

My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, “You’re tearing up the grass.” “We’re not raising grass,” Dad would reply. “We’re raising boys.”

—Harmon Killebrew

The father who does not teach his son is duties is equally guilty with the son who neglects them.                                         —Confucius