Here we compiled a list of dad sayings that will teach you many of life’s greatest lessons. They also describe how awesome dads really are. May these quotes inspire you to become a better child to your father and a better person to the world.
Dad Sayings
1. Men should always change diapers. It’s a very rewarding experience. It’s mentally cleansing. It’s like washing dishes, but imagine if the dishes were your kids, so you really love the dishes. – Chris Martin
2. Remember: What dad really wants is a nap. Really. – Dave Barry
3. Lately, all my friends are worried that they’re turning into their fathers. I’m worried that I’m not. – Dan Zevin
4. My wife just let me know I’m about to become a father for the first time. The bad news is that we already have two kids. – Brian Kiley
5. A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty.
6. The father who would taste the essence of his fatherhood must turn back from the plane of his experience, take with him the fruits of his journey and begin again beside his child, marching step by step over the same old road. – Angelo Patri
7. You will find that if you really try to be a father, your child will meet you halfway. – Robert Brault
8. Why are men reluctant to become fathers? They aren’t through being children. – Cindy Garner
9. Being a great father is like shaving. No matter how good you shaved today, you have to do it again tomorrow. – Reed Markham
10. Be a dad. Don’t be ‘Mom’s Assistant’. Be a man. Fathers have skills that they never use at home. You run a landscaping business and you can’t dress and feed a four-year-old? Take it on. Spend time with your kids. It won’t take away your manhood, it will give it to you. – Louis CK
11. Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is “soap-on-a-rope. – Bill Cosby
12. My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me. – Jim Valvano
13. It is easier for a father to have children than for children to have a real father. – Pope John XXIII
14. A father carries pictures where his money used to be.
15. I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection. – Sigmund Freud
16. It was my father who taught me to value myself. He told me that I was uncommonly beautiful and that I was the most precious thing in his life. – Dawn French
17. A father is a man who expects his son to be as good a man as he meant to be. – Frank A. Clark
18. It is a wise father that knows his own child. – William Shakespeare
19. If the new American father feels bewildered and even defeated, let him take comfort from the fact that whatever he does in any fathering situation has a 50 percent chance of being right. – Bill Cosby
20. When my kids were younger, I used to avoid them. I used to sit on the toilet ’til my legs fell asleep. Do you want to know why your father spends so long in the toilet? Because he’s not sure he wants to be a father. – Louis CK
21. Fathers represent another way of looking at life — the possibility of an alternative dialogue. – Louise J. Kaplan
22. Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents. – Margaret Mead
23. The father who does not teach his son his duties is equally guilty with the son who neglects them. – Confucius
24. The fundamental defect with fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them. – Bertrand Russel
25. Fathers, like mothers, are not born. Men grow into fathers and fathering is a very important stage in their development. – David Gottesman
26. Be kind to thy father, for when thou were young, who loved thee so fondly as he? He caught the first accents that fell from thy tongue and joined in thy innocent glee. – Margaret Courtney
27. Noble fathers have noble children. – Euripedes
28. Until you have a son of your own, you will never know the joy, the love beyond feeling that resonates in the heart of a father as he looks upon his son. You will never know the sense of honor that makes a man want to be more than he is and to pass something good and hopeful into the hands of his son. And you will never know the heartbreak of the fathers who are haunted by the personal demons that keep them from being the men they want their sons to be. – Kent Nerburn
29. 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
30. The older I get, the smarter my father seems to get. – Tim Russert
31. By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong. – Charles Wadsworth
32. The only man a girl can trust is her daddy.
33. Some people don’t believe in Heroes. They’ve never met my dad.
34. Whether you fall or fail, whether you cry or sob, all you can look forward to is that your dad believes in you. He picks you up, brushes you off, and lets you try again.
35. The best thing a father can do for his baby is to love his mother.
36. A good father is a man who supports his children even when he has no money.
37. The greatest gift I ever had came from God; I call him Dad!
38. Fathers are angles, without father the world seems to be nothing. I love you, papa, I miss you very much.
39. Your father may have passed away. But you can still look up to the sky and wave goodbye. You can’t forget him no matter what. But at least the sky has one more angel to say hi to. Love and miss you dad.
40. The nature of impending fatherhood is that you are doing something that you’re unqualified to do, and then you become qualified while doing it. – John Green
41. A happy family needs a loving and caring father, and he who knows how to be a mother sometimes.
42. A happy family is a reflection of a good father and a loving husband.
43. I’m as lucky as can be, for the world’s best dad belongs to me
44. Dad, a son’s first hero, a daughter’s first love.
45. A dad is someone who holds you when you cry, scolds you when you break the rules, shines with pride when you succeed, and has faith in you even when you fail.
46. Any man can be a father, but it takes a special person to be a dad.
47. I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection. – Sigmund Freud
48. A dad is someone you never outgrow your need for.
49. There is no place higher than on Daddy’s shoulders.
50. Fathers are angels sent from heaven.
51. Tiger father begets tiger son. – Chinese Proverb
52. A dad is your biggest fan, even when you strike out.
53. One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters. – George Herbert
54. Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other. – Joseph Joubert
55. A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again. – Enid Bagnold
56. Teaching a boy to be a man is the primary job of a father. – Clayton Lessor
57. A good father is one of the most unsung, unpraised, unnoticed, and yet one of the most valuable assets in our society. – Billy Graham
58. The father who would taste the essence of his fatherhood must turn back from the plane of his experience, take with him the fruits of his journey and begin again beside his child, marching step by step over the same old road. – Angelo Pat
59. 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
60. There is wisdom in every man, in every father, in your father. And that’s true whether you love him or despise him. – Joe Kita,
61. Henry James once defined life as that predicament which precedes death, and certainly, nobody owes you a debt of honor or gratitude for getting him into that predicament. But a child does owe his father a debt, if Dad, having gotten him into this peck of trouble, takes off his coat and buckles down to the job of showing his son how best to crash through it. – Clarence Budington Kelland
62. The father who would taste the essence of his fatherhood must turn back from the plane of his experience, take with him the fruits of his journey and begin again beside his child, marching step by step over the same old road. – Angelo Patri
63. The words that a father speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not heard by the world, but, as in whispering-galleries, they are clearly heard at the end and by posterity. – Jean Paul Richter
64. It is much easier to become a father than to be one. – Kent Nerburn
65. I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom. – Umberto Eco
66. The heart of a father is the masterpiece of nature. – Antoine-François
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67. 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 is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan. – Garrison Keillor
68. Even in the best father-son relationships, there’s an uncomfortable familiarity that inhibits us from talking like friends. – Joe Kita,
69. The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat. – Robert Frost
70. Why are men reluctant to become fathers? They aren’t through being children.- Cindy Garner
71. A man can have many children, but a child can only have one father.
72. 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
73. I killed the monsters. That’s what fathers do. – F.K. Wallace
74. My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it. – Quentin Crisp
75. My dad once told me life would get complicated when I grew up. I’m guessing this isn’t what he meant. My mom, on the other hand, agreed with him, and I’m guessing this kind of thing is exactly what she meant. – Susan Ee,
76. Let me say for now that we knew once the Creation was broken, true fathering would be much more lacking than mothering. Don’t misunderstand me, both are needed- but an emphasis on fathering is necessary because of the enormity of its absence. – Wm. Paul Young
77. You can’t outrun your problems, Daisy. They’ll be just be waiting for you when you come back. – Sarah Hina
78. He didn’t say a lot so I tend to remember what he did say. And I don’t remember that he had a lot of patience with having to say things twice so I learned to listen the first time. – Cormac McCarthy
79. Father has a strengthening character like the sun and mother has a soothing temper like the moon. – Amit Kalantri,
80. Love means Daddy saying keep your mama company till I get back. And me doing it. – Eloise Greenfield
81. Listen to God with a broken heart. He is not only the doctor who mends it but also the father who wipes away the tears. – Criss Jami
82. He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father. – Jonathan Safran Foer
83. A man who is not a father to his children can never be a real man. – Mario Puzo
84. No love is greater than that of a father for His son. – Dan Brown
85. People are supposed to aspire to become their fathers, not shudder at the thought. – Veronica Roth
86. You don’t raise heroes, you raise sons. And if you treat them like sons, they’ll turn out to be heroes, even if it’s just in your own eyes. – Walter M. Schirra, Sr.
87. Sadie,” he said forlornly, “when you become a parent, you may understand this. One of my hardest jobs as a father, one of my greatest duties, was to realize that my own dreams, my own goals, and wishes, are secondary to my children’s. – Rick Riordan
88. Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition, but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express. – Joseph Addison
89. My father spoke with his hands. He was deaf. His voice was in his hands. And his hands contained his memories. – Myron Uhlberg,
90. When you become a father, it changes you.” Snorri spoke towards the fire’s glow. “You see the world in new ways. Those who are not changed were not properly men, to begin with. – Mark Lawrence,
91. There’s no better cure for the fear of taking after one’s father, than not to know who he is. – André Gide,
92. In all of your living, don’t forget to live. – Ricky Maye
93. Now you look here. All your father ever dreamed of for you was to do something you loved in life. He didn’t care about fancy qualifications or fancy clothes or cars, just that you were both happy and fulfilled. He was so excited about your dreams for a career. – Hazel Gaynor
94. Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance. – Ruth E. Renkel
95. Your father is the only God. You can also become God but you must follow a simple rule and let that rule be made up of love. – Santosh Kalwar
96. If the Ganges is the mother, Himalayas is the father. One nurtures and nourishes, the other provides and protects. – Vinita Kinra
97. Just because your father’s present, doesn’t mean he isn’t absent. – Elizabeth Acevedo
98. It is admirable for a man to take his son fishing, but there is a special place in heaven for the father who takes his daughter shopping. – John Sinor
99. If you ever want to torture my dad, tie him up and right in front of him, refold a map incorrectly. – Cathy Ladman
100. You fathers will understand. You have a little girl. She looks up to you. You’re her oracle. You’re her hero. And then the day comes when she gets her first permanent wave and goes to her first real party, and from that day on, you’re in a constant state of panic. – Stanley T. Banks
101. I smile because you’re my father. I laugh because there’s nothing you can do about it.
102. A daughter is a treasure and a cause of sleeplessness. – Ben Sirach
103. A little girl giggles when she is denied an ice-cream by her mother. She knows daddy will get her some later.
104. Dad, you’ve always been the coolest – like all those times you said ‘yes’ when Mom said ‘no.
105. Fathers, be your daughter’s first love and she’ll never settle for anything less.
106. A daughter needs a dad to be the standard against which she will judge all men.
107. In the darkest days, when I feel inadequate, unloved and unworthy, I remember whose daughter I am and I straighten my crown.
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108. It was my father who taught me to value myself. – Dawn French
109. A good father will leave his imprint on his daughter for the rest of her life. – Dr. James Dobson
110. A father is neither an anchor to hold us back nor a sail to take us there but a guiding light whose love shows us the way.
111. The love between a father and daughter is forever.
112. When my father didn’t have my hand, he had my back. – Linda Poindexter
113. A father’s tears and fears are unseen, his love is unexpressed, but his care and protection remain as a pillar of strength throughout our lives. – Ama H. Vanniarachchy
114. I’ve made it my business to observe fathers and daughters. And I’ve seen some incredible, beautiful things. Like the little girl who’s not very cute – her teeth are funny, and her hair doesn’t grow right, and she’s got on thick glasses – but her father holds her hand and walks with her like she’s a tiny angel that no one can touch. He gives her the best gift a woman can get in this world: protection. And the little girl learns to trust the man in her life. And all the things that the world expects from women – to be beautiful, to soothe the troubled spirit, heal the sick, care for the dying, send the greeting card, bake the cake – all of those things become the way we pay the father back for protecting us. – Adriana Trigiani
115. When my daughter says ‘Daddy I need you!’ I wonder if she has any idea that I need her billion times more. – Stanley Behrman
116. To a father growing old, nothing is dearer than a daughter. – Euripides
117. The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. – Richard Bach
118. It was my father who taught me to value myself. He told me that I was uncommonly beautiful and that I was the most precious thing in his life. – Dawn French
119. He sweeps her hair back from her ears and he swings her above his head. He says she is his émerveillement, he says he will never leave her, not in a million years. – Anthony Doerr
120. A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day. – Sarah Ruhl
121. There is nothing that moves a loving father’s soul quite like his child’s cry. – Joni Eareckson Tada
122. The greatest mark of a father is how he treats his children when no one is looking. – Dan Pearce
123. Rich men’s sons are seldom rich men’s fathers. – Herbert Kaufman
124. I’m so proud of you that it makes me proud of me. I hope you know that. – John Green
125. I will follow in my father’s footsteps. My father set the bar very high. He was a wonderful leader. – Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck
126. My father used to say, ‘Let them see you and not the suit. That should be secondary. – Cary Grant
127. It is easier for a father to have children than for children to have a real father. – Pope John XXIII
128. Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son. – George Lucas
129. There must always be a struggle between a father and son, while one aims at power and the other at independence. – Samuel Johnson
130. It’s a father’s duty to give his sons a fine chance. – George Eliot
131. For thousands of years, father and son have stretched wistful hands across the canyon of time. – Alan Valentine
132. Anyone who reads my work will see that there are often difficult relationships between fathers and sons. – Salman Rushdie
133. When you teach your son, you teach your son’s son. – The Talmud
134. Every father should remember that one day his son will follow his example instead of his advice. – Charles F Kettering
135. Not every father gets a chance to start his son off in his own footsteps. – Alan Ladd
