Paternal Influence Quotes

When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at is son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, not even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father.

Every father is given the opportunity to corrupt his daughter's nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations.

I've never known my real father, and I've never looked for a father figure in a boyfriend, but I suppose I have looked for real father figures in my life - and I've acquired more than one. I certainly couldn't ask for better ones. I love them enormously - and they know that.

With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter's heart.

I have no worthwhile memories of my father, therefore no idea of what a father's role should be.

Within the first six years of my life, if asked what Dad was to me I would have emphatically responded: 'Dad is fun!' This was my simple foundation for my enduring relationship with my father.

And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudices and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!

I want to be able to be a father to my kids, where I've never seen my father, but my kids can see me whenever they want, so that was broken.

I didn't grow up with my dad, so it was always very funny to me, and always has been, what an important part DNA plays in one's life.

My dad was a big grinder, a tough guy. I inherited that from him.

What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women.

There's a lot of single black women who did the best that they could and that's a beautiful thing, but they don't know how necessary a father is in a kid's life and how much guys miss that deep down inside.

What we men share is the experience of having been raised by women in a culture that stopped our fathers from being close enough to teach us how to be men, in a world in which men were discouraged from talking about our masculinity and questioning its roots and its mystique, in a world that glorified masculinity and gave us impossibly unachievable myths of masculine heroics, but no domestic models to teach us how to do it.

The happiest and holiest children in the world are the children whose fathers succeed in winning both their tender affection and their reverential and loving fear. And they are the children who will come to understand most easily the mystery of the fatherhood of God.

It's not that we have too much mother, but too little father. We can't forgive our mothers for taking the place of our fathers until we are ready to see that the point of a man's life is to be a father and a mentor, and we can't do that because we don't know how we would be a father or a mentor when we never had one.

Every one of my father's songs is a lesson.

It means everything to be a father. I had a father growing up, so I wanted my kids to have a father as well.

The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.

My father, when he went, made my childhood a gift of a half a century.

I think I'm far too hopeful and trusting. That's something I got from my mum.

Not every father gets a chance to start his son off in his own footsteps.

I love my daddy. My daddy's everything. I hope I can find a man that will treat me as good as my dad.

Daddy was never ruthless but he was tough.

We never get over our fathers, and we’re not required to. (Irish Proverb)

What you have to understand, is your father was your model for God.