Reflections on the father, ideas, a tribute of opinions and thoughts on the father and on fathers in general by various authors and famous writers and artists.
Fatherhood is a journey unlike any other – a voyage that should be marked by the steady rhythm of sacrifice and love. It’s a role that often begins with uncertainty and trepidation, yet blossoms into a profound sense of purpose and fulfillment. Like a sturdy oak, a father stands tall amidst life’s storms, offering shelter and guidance to his family.
Carl William Brown
In accordance with the traditional role system, men have taken on the full burden of supporting the family: they have thus been deprived of any emotional contact with their children and are burdened with responsibilities that often lead to serious physical and psychological disorders.
Birgitta Linner
Current society is not able to satisfactorily replace the economic and educational action of the father. In the educational and administrative function he carried out in other times, indeed in his own rigor, a need found expression, albeit an unfortunate one, which still exists today, and which society, while endangering the family, nevertheless does not satisfy. Under the father’s weight, the children learned not to understand failures in terms of their social causes, but to hold on to their individual origins and to make them absolute as guilt, failure or personal inferiority. If the family fulfilled its task, the children thus acquired a conscience, the ability to love and coherence.
M. Horkheimer & Th. W. Adorno
A quiet fifty-year-old employee, returning from the beatification ceremony of the great saint of Pietralcina, stabbed his wife and two young daughters to death. Another extreme example of the immense strength of the great pious father to stimulate suggestive and inexplicable miraculous events.
Carl William Brown
What you, father, had to win by fighting, we received from your hands, but the fight for life, the one that was immediately familiar to you, and which naturally wasn’t spared us either, we had to fight later, with infantile strengths in adulthood.
F. Kafka
And it is reflected that the only fear that children usually have is of the father: and then they will fear the mother, the master, the threshing floor, when the father makes himself feared by the children and subordinates the children to the mother, to the teacher, on the farmyard; and gives these his authority by making them his lieutenants; so their directions take shape from his paternal authority.
G.M. Sarnelli
The church has set up a pay telephone line where you can listen to songs elaborated with the lyrics of the rosary, songs which are also part of a CD which is also about to be released in shops. I want to remind the Holy Father that sacred prostitution also exists and that if he himself needs money he could also make the nuns work a little.
Carl William Brown
The biological data certainly suggests that it was the man who achieved paternity, while the woman was a mother from the beginning, before the man decided to rape her, hate her, enslave her and then envy and imitate her [. ..] It certainly seems extremely paradoxical to say that fatherhood is a maternal trait of man, but it is as paradoxical as it is true.
G. Zilboorg
It is the family statute that one day we will have to modify from top to bottom, since traditional families are populous, and all moralists have been profuse in praising them. We want to take these moralists at their word, and since fertility has become criminal, one day we will rage against crime, upsetting the family statute. Furthermore, it is here that the school of slavery is based, and this is why tyrants love traditional families, in which the woman is a servant and the children are submissive, while the father – even if obscene, ridiculous and miserable – is master in his house and archetype of our princes, that is, living model of our gods and our kings! This arrangement has lasted too long, the mass of perdition is the consequence.
Albert Caraco
I once knew a little boy in England who asked his father, ‘Do fathers always know more than sons?’ and the father replied, ‘Yes.’ Then the little boy asked: ‘Dad, who invented the steam engine?’ And his father said: ‘James Watt’. And then the son replied: ‘But why didn’t his father invent it?’.
G. Bateson
A boy’s perception of a father as a loving and powerful individual is of supreme importance for the development of masculinity, but there is no evidence to say that the personality structure of the parents, particularly the degree of sexual typification and confidence in themselves have a significant influence. Indeed, parents’ encouragement of the boy’s participation in masculine activities does not appear to have a significant effect on the young man’s preferences for a sexual role.
P. Mussen/E. Rutherford
If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey the voice of his father or his mother and, although they have chastised him, does not listen to them, his father and his mother will take him and bring him to the elders of the city, at the gate of the place where he lives, and they will say to the elders of the city: This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious; he does not want to obey our voice, he is a wanton and a drinker. Then all the men of his city will stone him and he will die; thus you will eradicate evil from yourself.
Deuteronomy, Old Testament
At the restaurant, two tables over from mine, this evening there is a man who I seem to know… He too, at a certain point, turns and smiles. So that’s true. I smile back with a nod, but I can’t quite remember where we’ve met before. Later, when it was time to leave, the guy, passing by me, placed a hand on my shoulder. “How’s it going, son?” “Dad! I’ll be damned! What do you do around here?”
Romano Bertola
Freud considered God as an empowered father. To me he seems more like a fairytale character, like the big bad wolf, the black man or the ogre, who has the unpleasant task of scaring the poor devils in order to force them to sadly and passively observe the stupid morality of the wealthy . It has performed this function very well for many centuries, at least until power invented the mass media.
Carl William Brown
As Lacan says, it is certain that the father’s place is often left empty. Not occupied by the man who is called the father, nor does it appear to be occupied by anyone. In fact, the place is purely and simply empty. There is an opening for male authority, but the authority that actually exists (when it exists) is often not what is called an authority. It is terror, it is mere power, brute force, which does not arouse the slightest respect, but only fear.
R.D. Laing
The father of modern stress research, Hans Seyle, states that stress does not depend so much on what happens, but on how we interpret it. Even so, I wish him every possible misfortune, and then we’ll see.
Carl William Brown
When men live more for the memory of what has been than for the concern of what is, when they are more dedicated to respect for what their ancestors thought than to thinking themselves, the father is the natural link between the past and present […] When society becomes democratized and men adopt as their general principle that it is good and right to judge everything on their own, using previous beliefs not as a rule and a dogma of faith, but simply as a means of information, the power exercised by a father’s way of thinking over that of his children diminishes as does his legal power.
A. de Tocqueville
Humorous reflection, don’t take it too seriously. As regards my biography, it is enough for posterity to know that I was a boy of vast reading, of enormous culture, of profound wisdom, of coherent wisdom, of immeasurable psychic strength and of innumerable practical experiences. As regards that of my parents, it is enough to know that they were the father and mother of a great philosopher.
Carl William Brown
Motherhood is not fatherhood. In motherhood the woman abandons her body to the child. And the children are on top of her as if on a hill, as in a garden, they eat her, they beat her, they sleep on top of her and she lets herself be devoured and sometimes she sleeps while they are on top of her. Nothing like this will ever happen in fatherhood.
Marguerite Duras
As I grew up, observing the world more and more, my humor developed dramatically, so much so that when my father sat down to avidly read the obituary page I couldn’t help but asking him if there was perhaps any funny news.
Carl William Brown
The person who fears becoming a father does not understand that fatherhood is not something perfect that men do, but something that perfects man. The end product of raising children is not the child but the parent.
Frank Smith Pittman III
Relationships based on faithful love, until death, such as marriage, fatherhood, being children, brotherhood, are learned and lived within the family unit. When these relationships form the fabric of a human society, they give it cohesion and consistency.
Pope francesco
None of you can ever be proud enough of being the child of SUCH a Father who has not his equal in this world – so great, so good, so faultless. Try, all of you, to follow in his footsteps and don’t be discouraged, for to be really in everything like him none of you, I am sure, will ever be. Try, therefore, to be like him in some points, and you will have acquired a great deal.
Queen Victoria
Henry James once defined life as that predicament which precedes death, and certainly nobody owes you a debt of honor or gratitude for getting him into that predicament. But a child does owe his father a debt, if Dad, having gotten him into this peck of trouble, takes off his coat and buckles down to the job of showing his son how best to crash through it.
Clarence Budington Kelland
Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later… that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life.
Tom Wolfe
Being a dad has made me more aware of myself. I can see all of my virtues and flaws. They become glaringly clear when my daughter communicates with me in the same ways that I communicate with her. I can really tell where and when I went wrong.
Harold perrineau
Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important. And we are called to recognize and honor how critical every father is to that foundation. They are teachers and coaches. They are mentors and role models. They are examples of success and the men who constantly push us toward it. But if we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing ? missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.
Barack Obama
The thing to remember about fathers is, they’re men. A girl has to keep it in mind: They are dragon-seekers, bent on improbable rescues. Scratch any father, you find someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, believing change is a threat – like your first shoes with heels on, like your first bicycle it took such months to get.
Phyllis McGinley
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.
Mario Cuomo
On the same topic you can also read:
Riflessioni e pensieri sul padre
