Quotes about father
page 21

Victor Hugo photo
Ogden Nash photo

“Being a father
Is quite a bother,
But I like it, rather.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

"Soliloquy in Circles"
Versus (1949)

Arthur Schopenhauer photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“And I'm going on in believing in Him. You'd better know Him, and know His name, and know how to call His name. You may not know philosophy. You may not be able to say with Alfred North Whitehead that He's the Principle of Concretion. You may not be able to say with Hegel and Spinoza that He is the Absolute Whole. You may not be able to say with Plato that He's the Architectonic Good. You may not be able to say with Aristotle that He's the Unmoved Mover. But sometimes you can get poetic about it if you know Him. You begin to know that our brothers and sisters in distant days were right. Because they did know Him as a rock in a weary land, as a shelter in the time of starving, as my water when I'm thirsty, and then my bread in a starving land. And then if you can't even say that, sometimes you may have to say, "He's my everything. He's my sister and my brother. He's my mother and my father." If you believe it and know it, you never need walk in darkness. Don't be a fool. Recognize your dependence on God. As the days become dark and the nights become dreary, realize that there is a God who rules above. And so I’m not worried about tomorrow. I get weary every now and then. The future looks difficult and dim, but I’m not worried about it ultimately because I have faith in God.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool (1967)

Jonathan Ive photo

“With a father who is a fabulous craftsman, I was raised with the fundamental belief that it is only when you personally work with a material with your hands, that you come to understand its true nature, its characteristics, its attributes, and I think – very importantly – its potential.”

Jonathan Ive (1967) English designer and VP of Design at Apple

Dezeen: "Fewer designers seem to be interested in how something is actually made" says Jonathan Ive https://www.dezeen.com/2016/05/03/fewer-designers-interested-in-how-something-is-made-jonathan-ive-apple-manus-x-machina/ (3 May 2016)

Lin Yutang photo
Ian McDonald photo
Muhammad photo

“The Prophet said "None of you will have faith till he loves me more than his father, his children and all mankind."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Narrated Anas, in Bukhari, Volume 1, Book 2, Number 15
Sunni Hadith

“Ooh, little boy, in between changing fathers.
Little girl has to live without Mother.
They don't understand why they seem not to need them,
Although all they need is a loving hand.”

Amber (1970) Dutch born German singer, songwriter, label owner and executive producer

"More Time for a Child" (written by Amber's sister, Anne-Fleur Cremers), My Kind of World (2004).

Henry D. Moyle photo

“This great principle does not deny to the needy nor to the poor the assistance they should have. The wholly incapacitated, the aged, the sickly are cared for with all tenderness, but every able-bodied person is enjoined to do his utmost for himself to avoid dependence, if his own efforts can make such a course possible; to look upon adversity as temporary; to combine his faith in his own ability with honest toil; to rehabilitate himself and his family to a position of independence; in every case to minimize the need for help and to supplement any help given with his own best efforts. We believe [that] seldom [do circumstances arise in which] men of rigorous faith, genuine courage, and unfaltering determination, with the love of independence burning in their hearts, and pride in their own accomplishments, cannot surmount the obstacles that lie in their paths. We know that through humble, prayerful, industrious, God-fearing lives, a faith can be developed within us by the strength of which we can call down the blessings of a kind and merciful Heavenly Father and literally see our handicaps vanish and our independence and freedom established and maintained.”

Henry D. Moyle (1889–1963) Member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles

Conference Report, Apr. 1948, p. 5, and quoted in The Celestial Nature of Self-reliance http://lds.org/portal/site/LDSOrg/menuitem.b12f9d18fae655bb69095bd3e44916a0/?vgnextoid=2354fccf2b7db010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD&locale=0&sourceId=0b3ac5e8b4b6b010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____&hideNav=1|
Quotes as an apostle

Pierre Corneille photo

“A true king is neither husband nor father;
He considers his throne and nothing else.”

Un véritable roi n'est ni mari ni père;
Il regarde son trône, et rien de plus.
Nicomède, act IV, scene iii.
Nicomède (1651)

Margaret Mead photo
George William Curtis photo
Helen Hunt Jackson photo
Ray Harryhausen photo

“In April 1946, when I came to Hughes Aircraft to institute high-technology research and development, it was far from the place it was to become. Howard Hughes, I was informed, rarely came around. When he did show up, it was to take up one or another trivial issue. He would toss off detailed directions, for instance, on what to do next about a few old airplanes decaying out in the yard or what kind of seat covers to buy for the company-owned Chevrolets, or he would say he wanted some pictures of clouds taken from an airplane. An accountant from Hughes Tool Co. ((started by Howard's father)) had the title of general manager but was there only to sign checks. A few of Howard's flying buddies were on the payroll, using assorted fanciful titles like some in Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, but apparently did next to nothing. A lawyer was on hand to process contracts, but there were practically none. In addition to the Spruce Goose flying freighter, a mammoth eight-engine plywood seaplane that barely managed to fly even once, there was an experimental Navy reconnaissance plane under development (which, with Hughes at the controls, later crashed, almost killing him). The contracts for both planes had been canceled. Perhaps, I said to myself, this is one of those unforeseeable lucky opportunities. Why not use Hughes Aircraft as a base to create a new and needed defense electronics supplier?”

Simon Ramo (1913–2016) Father of the ICBM

MEMOIRS OF AN ICBM PIONEER Simon Ramo broke with Howard Hughes, then built TRW, the company that developed the U.S. missile. He says what went right then would go wrong today. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1988/04/25/70453/index.htm in FORTUNE Magazine, April 25, 1988

Lycurgus photo
Frederick William Robertson photo
Steve Coogan photo

“He is the embodiment of Fleet Street bullying, using his newspaper to peddle his Little-England, curtain-twitching Alan Partridgesque view of the world, which manages to combine sanctimonious, pompous moralising and prurient, voyeuristic, judgmental obsession, like a Victorian father masturbating secretly in his bedroom.”

Steve Coogan (1965) English actor and comedian

on Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre in We've been betrayed by David Cameron http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/29/we-have-been-betrayed-by-cameron, The Guardian (2012)

Lana Turner photo
Sheikh Hasina photo

“As leaders and activists of Awami League, our responsibility is to fulfill the dream of the father of the nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib so that every person in the country gets food, home, education, health care and prosperous life.”

Sheikh Hasina (1947) Prime Minister of Bangladesh

While addressing a special extended party meeting at the Gonobhaban, the official residence of the Prime Minister of Bangladesh (20 May 2017). http://www.thedailystar.net/politics/bangladesh-prime-minister-sheikh-hasina-speech-awami-league-politics-meeting-gono-bhaban-1408087

Bill Bryson photo

“I knew more things in the first ten years of my life than I believe I have known at any time since. I knew everything there was to know about our house for a start. I knew what was written on the undersides of tables and what the view was like from the tops of bookcases and wardrobes. I knew what was to be found at the back of every closet, which beds had the most dust balls beneath them, which ceilings the most interesting stains, where exactly the patterns in wallpaper repeated. I knew how to cross every room in the house without touching the floor, where my father kept his spare change and how much you could safely take without his noticing (one-seventh of the quarters, one-fifth of the nickels and dimes, as many of the pennies as you could carry). I knew how to relax in an armchair in more than one hundred positions and on the floor in approximately seventy- five more. I knew what the world looked like when viewed through a Jell-O lens. I knew how things tasted—damp washcloths, pencil ferrules, coins and buttons, almost anything made of plastic that was smaller than, say, a clock radio, mucus of every variety of course—in a way that I have more or less forgotten now. I knew and could take you at once to any illustration of naked women anywhere in our house, from a Rubens painting of fleshy chubbos in Masterpieces of World Painting to a cartoon by Peter Arno in the latest issue of The New Yorker to my father’s small private library of girlie magazines in a secret place known only to him, me, and 111 of my closest friends in his bedroom.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Source: The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006), p. 36

Muhammad photo
Anthony Trollope photo
Sienna Guillory photo
Norodom Ranariddh photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo

“[T]he generation of the Founding Fathers, who certainly knew the story of Noah and his sons, nonetheless believed in the equality of the races.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 224

Muhammad photo
António Lobo Antunes photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Gustave Nadaud photo
Malachi photo

“A son honors his father,
And a servant his master.
If then I am the Father,
Where is my honor?
And if I am a Master,
Where is My reverence?”

Malachi Biblical prophet

Source: Book of Malachi, Chapter 1, Verse 6, Lines 1-6 (NKJV)

Jane Austen photo
Paul Éluard photo

“Kodra is the father of a new world civilization”

Paul Éluard (1895–1952) French poet

Kodra est le père d'une nouvelle civilisation du monde.
Paul Éluard in w:1940
Citation reported: Robert Elsie. Historical Dictionary of Albania, Historical Dictionaries of Europe, No. 75 (2010). The Scarecrow Press Inc. Toronto. p. 232.

Joseph Smith, Jr. photo
Samuel Butler photo
Warren Farrell photo
Aleister Crowley photo
Jim Morrison photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Hermann Hesse photo
Warren Farrell photo
Max Born photo
David Brewster photo

“The only sure mode of acquiring sound ideas of our relation to the Creator is to begin with the study of ourselves, and to view God as a Father and Friend, dealing with us in precisely the same way as we would deal with others over whom we exercise authority. Conscience, that infallible Mentor "that sticketh closer than a brother," tells us that we are responsible beings; and in the domestic, as well as the social circle, we speedily feel the discipline and learn the lesson of rewards and punishments. The law written in man's heart points to the past as pregnant with events which may affect the future; and in the earnestness of his aspirations, and the activity of his search, he is gradually led to the mysterious history of his race. He learns that on tables of stone have been engraven the same law to which his heart responded; -that when all were dead, one died for all; and in the contemplation of the great sacrifice, he obtains a solution of the interesting problem of his individual destiny. The Sacred record which is now his guide, speaks to him of fore-knowledge and predestination, while, in perfect consistency, it records the ministration of descending spirits, and the holier communings of God with man. The Divine decrees no longer perplex him. They transcend, indeed, his Reason - but that Reason, the faithful interpreter of Conscience, does not falter in proclaiming the Freedom of his Will, and the Responsibility of his Actions.”

David Brewster (1781–1868) British astronomer and mathematician

Review of Vestiges (1845)

Christopher Pitt photo
Andrei Sakharov photo
Josefa Iloilo photo
Mr. T photo
George Bernard Shaw photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
George S. Patton photo

“Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies and establish Thy justice among men and nations.”

George S. Patton (1885–1945) United States Army general

Though Patton commissioned this prayer and ordered 250,000 copies of it printed with his signature, it was actually composed by Chief Chaplain James H. O'Neill http://www.pattonhq.com/prayer.html Review of the News (6 October 1971)
Misattributed

Muharrem İnce photo
Diogenes Laërtius photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Anne Brontë photo
Maimónides photo
Joe Biden photo
William Blake photo

“Why art thou silent and invisible,
Father of Jealousy?”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

To Nobodaddy, st. 1
1790s, Poems from Blake's Notebook (c. 1791-1792)

Hermann Hesse photo
Gulzarilal Nanda photo
Kathy Griffin photo
Sharon Stone photo

“My father has always been supportive of my individuality.”

Sharon Stone (1958) American actress and fashion model

Barbara Walters interview, September 1993.

Jeremy Corbyn photo
Benjamin Banneker photo
Roger Waters photo
Jacques Ellul photo
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky photo
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky photo
Joseph Hayne Rainey photo
Algernon Charles Swinburne photo
Amir Taheri photo

“The Islamists killed Benazir Bhutto as they killed her father. But they shouldn’t be allowed to kill Pakistan’s hopes for democracy.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"The Bhutto assassination: Democracy must go on" http://nypost.com/2007/12/28/the-bhutto-assassination-democracy-must-go-on/, New York Post (December 28, 2007).
New York Post

Paul Krugman photo
Felix Adler photo

“In the cases of nearly all of us, what our fathers were, we are, and we make up our reasons afterwards.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.29

André Maurois photo

“Long time he lay upon the sunny hill,
To his father's house below securely bound.”

Edwin Muir (1887–1959) British poet, novelist and translator

Childhood (1983)

Ann Coulter photo
Lewis Mumford photo

“Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865-1895 (1931), p. 3

Herbert Giles photo
Hariprasad Chaurasia photo
Dejan Stojanovic photo

“You ask how it is possible
To be your own father and son.

You should seek answers,
Although it is better to anticipate some,
To be the light and dream.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

"Father and Son," p. 13
The Shape (2000), Sequence: “Home of the Shape”

Quentin Crisp photo
Gaio Valerio Catullo photo

“Wandering through many countries and over many seas I come, my brother, to these sorrowful obsequies, to present you with the last guerdon of death, and speak, though in vain, to your silent ashes, since fortune has taken your own self away from me—alas, my brother, so cruelly torn from me! Yet now meanwhile take these offerings, which by the custom of our fathers have been handed down—a sorrowful tribute—for a funeral sacrifice; take them, wet with many tears of a brother, and for ever, my brother, hail and farewell!”
Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus Advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias, Ut te postremo donarem munere mortis Et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem. Quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum, Heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi, Nunc tamen interea haec prisco quae more parentum Tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias, Accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu, Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

CI, lines 1–10
Sir William Marris's translation:
By many lands and over many a wave
I come, my brother, to your piteous grave,
To bring you the last offering in death
And o'er dumb dust expend an idle breath;
For fate has torn your living self from me,
And snatched you, brother, O, how cruelly!
Yet take these gifts, brought as our fathers bade
For sorrow's tribute to the passing shade;
A brother's tears have wet them o'er and o'er;
And so, my brother, hail, and farewell evermore!
Carmina

Owen Lovejoy photo

“The Republican Party is for positive intervention. They propose, as our fathers did, to erect a wall of intervention, of prohibition, and station an angel of liberty at the gates in that wall, who shall keep watch and ward there day and night, and guard the territories against the entrance of slavery, as the cherubim of God kept sin out of Eden.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

As quoted in His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings, 1838–64 https://web.archive.org/web/20160319082926/https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA233#v=onepage&q&f=false (2004), edited by William Frederick Moore and Jane Ann Moore, p. 233
1860s, Speech (October 1860)

William Ewart Gladstone photo

“They are not your friends, but they are your enemies in fact, though not in intention, who teach you to look to the Legislature for the radical removal of the evils that afflict human life…It is the individual mind and conscience, it is the individual character, on which mainly human happiness or misery depends. (Cheers.) The social problems that confront us are many and formidable. Let the Government labour to its utmost, let the Legislature labour days and nights in your service; but, after the very best has been attained and achieved, the question whether the English father is to be the father of a happy family and the centre of a united home is a question which must depend mainly upon himself. (Cheers.) And those who…promise to the dwellers in towns that every one of them shall have a house and garden in free air, with ample space; those who tell you that there shall be markets for selling at wholesale prices retail quantities—I won't say are imposters, because I have no doubt they are sincere; but I will say they are quacks (cheers); they are deluded and beguiled by a spurious philanthropy, and when they ought to give you substantial, even if they are humble and modest boons, they are endeavouring, perhaps without their own consciousness, to delude you with fanaticism, and offering to you a fruit which, when you attempt to taste it, will prove to be but ashes in your mouths.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Cheers.
Speech at Blackheath (28 October 1871), quoted in The Times (30 October 1871), p. 3.
1870s

Elie Wiesel photo
J.M.W. Turner photo

“My dear Sir, [Mr. Trimmer] - I lament that all hope of the pleasure of seeing you, or getting to Heston, must for the present probably vanish. My father told me.... that you and Mrs. Trimmer would leave Heston for Suffolk as tomorrow, Wednesday.... In looking forward to a Continental excursion, and poor Daddy seems as much plagued with weeds as I am with disappointment - that if Miss … would but waive bashfulness, or, in other words, make an offer instead of expecting one, the same might change occupiers; but not to trouble you further, allow me, with most sincere respect to Mrs. Trimmer and family, to consider myself - Yours most truly obliged, 'J. M. W. Turner.”

J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) British Romantic landscape painter, water-colourist, and printmaker

Quote from Turner's letter to Mr. Trimmer; as cited in The Life of J. M. W. Turner R.A., George Walter Thornbury - A new Edition, Revised https://ia601807.us.archive.org/24/items/gri_33125004491185/gri_33125004491185.pdf; London Chatto & Windus, 1897, pp. 225-26
Turner asked assistance about a woman he liked, but not dared to approach; which he met at Trimmer's place at Heston
1795 - 1820

Mohamed ElBaradei photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Orson Pratt photo

“When, where, and how were you, Joseph Smith, first called? How old were you? and what were you qualifications? I was between fourteen and fifteen years of age. Had you been to college? No. Had you studied in any seminary of learning? No. Did you know how to read? Yes. How to write? Yes. Did you understand much about arithmetic? No. About grammar? No. Did you understand all the branches of education which are generally taught in our common schools? No. But yet you say the Lord called you when you were but fourteen or fifteen years of age? How did he call you? I will give you a brief history as it came from his own mouth. I have often heard him relate it. He was wrought upon by the Spirit of God, and felt the necessity of repenting of his sins and serving God. He retired from his father's house a little way, and bowed himself down in the wilderness, and called upon the name of the Lord. He was inexperienced, and in great anxiety and trouble of mind in regard to what church he should join. He had been solicited by many churches to join with them, and he was in great anxiety to know which was right. He pleaded with the Lord to give him wisdom on the subject; and while he was thus praying, he beheld a vision, and saw a light approaching him from the heavens; and as it came down and rested on the tops of the trees, it became more glorious; and as it surrounded him, his mind was immediately caught away from beholding surrounding objects. In this cloud of light he saw two glorious personages; and one, pointing to the other, said, "Behold my beloved son! hear ye him."”

Orson Pratt (1811–1881) Apostle of the LDS Church

Journal of Discourses 7:220 (August 14, 1859).
Joseph Smith Jr.'s First Vision

Michelle Obama photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo