Any man can be a Father but it takes someone special to be a dad.

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

I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.

For thousands of years, father and son have stretched wistful hands across the canyon of time, each eager to help the other to his side, but neither quite able to desert the loyalties of his contemporaries. The relationship is always changing and hence always fragile; nothing endures except the sense of difference.

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.

Fathers, like mothers, are not born. Men grow into fathers - and fathering is a very important stage in their development.

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.

The greatest gift I ever had Came from God; I call him Dad!

If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.

Father taught us that opportunity and responsibility go hand in hand. I think we all act on that principle; on the basic human impulse that makes a man want to make the best of what's in him and what's been given him.

Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance.

Dad, you're someone to look up to no matter how tall I've grown.

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

It's only when you grow up, and step back from him, or leave him for your own career and your own home - it is only then that you can measure his greatness and fully appreciate it. Pride reinforces love.

Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

Dad, your guiding hand on my shoulder will remain with me forever.

My father didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.

One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.

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

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.

A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty.

he 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.

What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.

Be kind to thy father, for when thou wert young, Who loved thee so fondly as he? He caught the first accents that fell from thy tongue, And joined in thy innocent glee.

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.