We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow;
Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so. [ Pope ]
Fathers alone a father's heart can know,
What secret tides of still enjoyment flow,
When brothers love, but if their hate succeeds,
They wage the war, but 'tis the father bleeds. [ Young ]
These earthly god-fathers of heaven's lights
That give a name to every fixed star
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk, and wot not what they are. [ William Shakespeare ]
No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly. [ Cervantes ]
Fathers that wear rags do make their children blind:
But fathers that bear bags shall see their children kind. [ William Shakespeare ]
Cling to thy native land, for it is the land of thy fathers! [ Schiller ]
Fathers, in reclaiming of a child, should outwit him, and seldom beat him. [ Proverb ]
Thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace, thou shalt be buried in a good old age. [ Genesis ]
Children will imitate their fathers in their vices, seldom in their repentance. [ Spu rgeon ]
Slumber not in the tents of your fathers! The world is advancing. Advance with it! [ Mazzini ]
Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]
A more valuable inheritance falls to each of us in our civil and legal rights than comes to us from our fathers. [ Cicero ]
Let us laugh! Our fathers laughed at their miseries, let us laugh at ours too! Why! Lisette is not cruel, nor is my flagon broken! [ Beranger ]
I think it must somewhere be written that the virtues of mothers shall occasionally be visited on their children, as well as the sins of fathers. [ Dickens ]
To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which one of the Fathers observes to be, not a virtue, but the groundwork of a virtue. [ Johnson ]
Mothers are more fond of their children than fathers are; for the bringing them forth is more painful, and they have a more certain knowledge that they are their own. [ Aristotle ]
If fathers are sometimes sulky at the appearance of the destined son-in-law, is it not a fact that mothers become sentimental and, as it were, love their own loves over again. [ Thackeray ]
I am one who finds within me a nobility that spurns! the idle pratings of the great, and their mean boasts of what their fathers were, while they themselves are fools effeminate. [ Percival ]
To be as good as our fathers, Me must be better. Imitation is not discipleship. When some one sent a cracked plate to China to have a set made, every piece in the new set had a crack in it. [ Wendell Phillips ]
Sir Anthony Absolute, two or three years before Evelina appeared, spoke the sense of the great body of sober fathers and husbands when he pronounced the circulating library an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge. [ Macaulay ]
Founders and senators of states and cities, lawgivers, extirpers of tyrants, fathers of the people, and other eminent persons in civil government, were honored but with titles of worthies or demigods; whereas such as were inventors and authors of new arts, endowments, and commodities towards man's life, were ever consecrated among the gods themselves. [ Bacon ]
Almost all men are over-anxious. No sooner do they enter the world than they lose that taste for natural and simple pleasures so remarkable in early life. Every hour do they ask themselves what progress they have made in the pursuit of wealth or honor; and on they go as their fathers went before them, till, weary and sick at heart, they look back with a sigh of regret to the golden time of their childhood. [ Rogers ]