Sarah E. Moffett

In honor of Father’s Day, below are some of my favorite literary quotes on dads. Ten points if you work it into a last minute Father’s Day card. Double it if you use one in a phone conversation.

“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

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.
~ Mark Twain

A father is a man who expects his children to be as good as he meant to be.
~ Carol Coats

“The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat.”
~Robert Frost

“My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.”
~Aldous Huxley

One father is more than a hundred Schoolmasters.
~George Herbert, Outlandish Proverbs, 1640

A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.
~ Gabriel García Márquez

My father, when he went, made my childhood a gift of a half a century.
~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

It is much easier to become a father than to be one.
~Kent Nerburn, Letters to My Son: Reflections on Becoming a Man, 1994

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

And my personal favorite~

Two little girls, on their way home from Sunday school, were solemnly discussing the lesson. “Do you believe there is a devil?” asked one. “No,” said the other promptly. “It’s like Santa Claus: it’s your father.”
~Ladies’ Home Journal, quoted in 2,715 One-Line Quotations for Speakers, Writers & Raconteurs by Edward F. Murphy

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