Father: a role model who gives the gifts of guidance and wisdom while learning how to stretch his ability to love beyond what he knew was possible.

Whether you are a father or planning to become one, you'll discover a nugget of wisdom and experience in each of these unforgettable "Father Quotes".

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

As you journey through [life], you will encounter all sorts of these nasty little upsets, and you will either learn to adjust yourself to them or gradually go nuts. - Groucho Marx

What you have inherited from your father, you must earn over again for yourselves, or it will not be yours. - Johann Wofgang von Goethe

No man can possibly know what life means, what the world means, what the world means, what anything means, until he has a child and loves it. - Lafcadio Hearn

When dealing with a two-year-old in the midst of a tantrum, fathers need to be particularly watchful about the tendency to need to feel victorious. - Dr. Kyle Pruett (Quoted in Dads, June/July 2000)

True maturity is only reached when a man realizes he has become a father figure to his daughters' girlfriends--and he accepts it. - Larry McMurtry

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

Let us teach them not only to do virtuously, but to excel. To excel they must be taught to be steady, active, and industrious. - John Adams

A boy, by the age of three years, senses that his destiny is to be a man, so he watches his father particularly--his interests, manner, speech, pleasures, his attitude toward work... - Benjamin Spock and Michael B. Rothenberg, Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care (1992)

Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged. - Colossians 3:20

To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own so that there is now a double delight seen in the glow of trust and affection, this is happiness. - J.B. Priestley

A girl's father is the first man in her life, and probably the most influential. - David Jeremiah (Quoted in Fathers Who Dare to Win by Ian Grant, 1999)

I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in fifty years what my father taught by example in one week. - Mario Cuomo

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. - Laurence Rockefeller

Hug. - Annie Pigeon, Dad's Little Instruction Book (1995)

These brief nuggets of gold describe the tremendous influence of a father upon his children. Particularly, they convey the importance of a loving spirit and how mutually beneficial a father-child relationship is. Through the years, we must be willing to learn much from our children, to grow with them, and give them the unconditional love and support needed to foster their trust, courage, and sense of personal responsibility.