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Father’s Day Quotes, Humor, and Stories

Other articles about Father’s Day:

• Joseph – Father’s Day Message
• Thoughts Regarding Father’s and Sons

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]The story is told of a father of five children who came home with a toy. He summoned his children and asked which of them should be given the present. “Who is the most obedient one here? Who never talks back to Mom and does everything that Mom says to do?” He inquired. There were a few seconds of silence, and then all of the children said in one accord: “You play with it Daddy!”

“A godly father is the unseen spiritual submarine who lurks below the surface of every activity of his child’s life. A man who has put on the full armor of God and with that armor, goes to warfare on his knees for his children, is a force to be reckoned with we cannot be with our children 24 hours a day through our prayers we have the ability to affect situations even when we are not physically present. You may be undetected but that does not mean you are ineffective.”
– Steve Farrar, Standing Tall, Page 199

A man came home from work late again, tired and irritated. He found his 5-year-old son waiting for him at the door. “Daddy, may I ask you a question?”
The dad replied: “Yeah, sure, what is it?”
“Daddy, how much money do you make an hour?”
The dad got mad and said, “That’s none of your business! Why do you want to know?”
The little boy said, “I just want to know. Please tell me, how much do you make an hour?”
The dad, wanting to sit down and relax, said, “If you must know, I make $20 an hour.”
The little boy sighed and bowed his head. Looking up, he asked, “Daddy, may I borrow $10 please?”
The father flew off the handle, “If the only reason you wanted to know how much money I make is so that you can hit me up for some cash to buy some stupid toy, then you march yourself straight to your room and go to bed. You’re so selfish. I work long, hard hours every day and don’t have time for this.”

The little boy quietly went to his room and shut the door.
The dad sat down and started to get even madder about the nerve of his little boy. How dare he ask questions only to get some money. After an hour or so, the man had calmed down, and started to think that maybe he was a bit hard on his boy. Maybe his son really needed the money for something important. And so, the father went up to his boy’s room and opened it, “Are you asleep, son?”
“No daddy. I’m awake,” replied the boy.
“I’ve been thinking, maybe I was too hard on you earlier. It’s been a long day, and I took it out on you. Here’s that 10 bucks you asked for.”
The little boy sat straight up, beaming. “Oh, thank you, daddy!” he exclaimed. Then, reaching under his pillow, he pulled out a wad of crumpled up bills.
The dad, seeing that the boy already had some money, started to get angry again. The little boy slowly counted out his money, and then looked up at his dad.
The dad, now ticked off, demanded to know what was going on, “Why did you want more money if you already had some?”
The little boy replied, “Because I didn’t have enough, but now I do. Daddy, I have $20 now…and I’d like to buy an hour of your time.”

The Top 10 Things You’ll Never Hear a Dad Say:
10. “Well, how ‘bout that? I’m lost! Looks like we’ll have to stop and ask for directions.”
9. “You know Pumpkin, now that you’re thirteen, you’ll be ready for un-chaperoned car dates. Won’t that be fun?”
8. “I noticed that all your friends have a certain hostile attitude. I like that.”
7. “Here’s a credit card and the keys to my new car. Go crazy!!!”
6. “What do you mean you wanna play football? Figure skating is not good enough for you, son?”
5. “Your Mother and I are going away for the weekend. You might want to consider throwing a party.”
4. “Well, I don’t know what’s wrong with your car. Probably one of those doo-hickey thingies—ya know—that makes it run or something. Just have it towed to a mechanic and pay whatever he asks.”
3. “No son of mine is going to live under this roof without an earring. Now quit your belly-aching and let’s go to the mall.”
2. “Whaddya wanna go and get a job for? I make plenty of money for you to spend.”
And the number one thing you’ll never hear a dad say:
1. “What do I want for Father’s Day? Aahh—don’t worry about that. It’s no big deal.” (actually they might say this, but they don’t mean it).

Lucille Ball, shortly before her death, did a remarkable TV interview with Merv Griffin. He asked her a very serious and pointed question: “Lucille, you’ve lived a long time on this earth and you are a wise person. What’s happened to our country? What’s wrong with our children? Why are our families falling apart? What’s missing?” Lucille Ball answered without hesitation: “Papa’s missing. Things are falling apart because Papa’s gone. If Papa were here he would fix it.”

“One morning my father didn’t get up and go to work. He went to the hospital and died the next day. I hadn’t thought that much about him before. He was just someone who left and came home and seemed glad to see everyone at night. He opened the jar of pickles when no one else could. He was the only one in the house who wasn’t afraid to go into the basement by himself. He cut himself shaving, but no one kissed it or got excited about it. It was understood that when it rained, he got the car and brought it around to the door. When anyone was sick, he went out to get the prescription filled. He took lots of pictures … but he was never in them. Whenever I played house, the mother doll had a lot to do. I never knew what to do with the daddy doll, so I had him say, “I’m going off to work now” and threw him under the bed. The funeral was in our living room and a lot of people came and brought all kinds of good food and cakes. We had never had so much company before. I went to my room and felt under the bed for the daddy doll. When I found him I dusted him off and put him on my bed. He never did anything. I didn’t know his leaving would hurt so much.” (Erma Bombeck, The Ties that Bind … And Gag! [NY: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1987], p. 2.)

“Fathers are the great gift-givers of the world!”
– Mrs. John Bruce Dodd, founder of Father’s Day

“One father is worth more than a hundred schoolmasters.”
– George Herbert

The father of a couple of teenagers called the telephone company and announced, “I want to report an obscene phone bill.”
– Vern McLellan

Father to teenage son: “No, you can’t use the car—but please feel free to use the lawnmower.”
– Vern McLellan

In The Effective Father, Gordon MacDonald writes:
It is said of Boswell, the famous biographer of Samuel Johnson, that he often referred to a special day in his childhood when his father took him fishing. The day was fixed in his mind, and he often reflected upon many things his father had taught him in the course of their fishing experience together. After having heard of that particular excursion so often, it occurred to someone much later to check the journal that Boswell’s father kept and determine what had been said about the fishing trip from the parental perspective. Turning to that date, the reader found only one sentence entered: “Gone fishing today with my son; a day wasted.”

“The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”
– Theodore Hesburgh

“My father didn’t tell me how to life; he lived, and let me watch him do it.”
– Clarence Budington Kelland

“You don’t raise heroes; you raise sons. And if you treat them like sons, they’ll turn out to be heroes, even if it’s just in your own eyes.”
– Walter Schirra Sr.

My father always told me, “Find a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.”
– Jim Fox

“It is a wise father that knows his own child.”
– Shakespeare

“God is the Father who is always home.”
– Unknown

“Of all nature’s gifts to the human race, what is sweeter to a man than his children?”
– Cicero

“The words that a father speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not heard by the world, but, as in whispering-galleries, they are clearly heard at the end and by posterity.”
– Jean Paul Richter

“It has been said that paternity is a career imposed on you without any inquiry into your fitness for it. That is why there are so many fathers who have children, but so few children who have fathers.”
– Adlai Stevenson

“A father is a man who expects his son to be as good a man as he meant to be.”
– Frank A. Clark

Small boy’s definition of Father’s Day: It’s just like Mother’s Day only you don’t spend so much.
– Unknown

Jim Bishop describes the feeling a father had when his daughter became engaged: “This is the third of four daughters. Every time it happens, I’m obsessed with the feeling I’m giving a million-dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.”

“A father is a thing that is forced to endure childbirth without an anesthetic…A father never feels worthy of the worship in a child’s eyes. He’s never quite the hero his daughter thinks, never quite the man his son believes him to be, and this worries him, sometimes. So he works too hard to try and smooth the rough places in the road for those of his own who will follow him…Fathers are what give daughters away to other men who aren’t nearly good enough, so they can have grandchildren who are smarter than anybody’s. Fathers make bets with insurance companies about who’ll live the longest. One day they lose and the bet’s paid off to the part of them they leave behind.”
– Paul Harvey

After the assassination of President Kennedy, his young son, John Jr., asked William Haddad, an associate of JFK’s, “Are you a daddy?” Haddad told him that he was. In response, little John Jr. said, “Then will you throw me up in the air?”

An Old Soldier’s Prayer
“Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid; one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.

“Build me a son whose wishes will not take the place of deeds; a son who will know Thee…and that to know himself is the foundation stone of knowledge.

“Build me a son whose heart will be clear, whose goal will be high, a son who will master himself before he seeks to master other men; one who will reach into the future, yet never forget the past.

“And after all these things are his, add, I pray, enough of a sense of humor, so that he may always be serious, yet never take himself too seriously. Give him humility, so that he may always remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom and the meekness of true strength.

“Then I, his father, will dare to whisper, “I have not lived in vain’.”
– Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur

Son Gets an Hour A Day
A young successful attorney said: “The greatest gift I ever received was a gift I got one Christmas when my dad gave me a small box. Inside was a note saying, ‘Son, this year I will give you 365 hours, an hour every day after dinner. It’s yours. We’ll talk about what you want to talk about, we’ll go where you want to go, play what you want to play. It will be your hour!’”

“My dad not only kept his promise,” he said, “but every year he renewed it—and it’s the greatest gift I ever had in my life. I am the result of his time.”
– Moody Monthly

In Search of Paco
There’s a Spanish story of a father and son who had become estranged. The son ran away, and the father set off to find him. He searched for months to no avail. Finally, in a last desperate effort to find him, the father put an ad in a Madrid newspaper. The ad read: Dear Paco, meet me in front of this newspaper office at noon on Saturday. All is forgiven. I love you. Your Father. On Saturday 800 Pacos showed up, looking for forgiveness and love from their fathers.
– Bits & Pieces, October 15, 1992, p. 13.

What Does a Father Do?
I received a letter from a single mother who had raised a son who was about to become a dad. Since he had no recollection of his own father, her question to me was “What do I tell him a father does?”

When my dad died in my ninth year, I, too, was raised by my mother, giving rise to the same question, “What do fathers do?” As far as I could observe, they brought around the car when it rained so everyone else could stay dry.

They always took the family pictures, which is why they were never in them. They carved turkeys on Thanksgiving, kept the car gassed up, weren’t afraid to go into the basement, mowed the lawn, and tightened the clothesline to keep it from sagging.

It wasn’t until my husband and I had children that I was able to observe firsthand what a father contributed to a child’s life. What did he do to deserve his children’s respect? He rarely fed them, did anything about their sagging diapers, wiped their noses or fannies, played ball, or bonded with them under the hoods of their cars.

What did he do?

He threw them higher than his head until they were weak from laughter. He cast the deciding vote on the puppy debate. He listened more than he talked. He let them make mistakes. He allowed them to fall from their first two-wheeler without having a heart attack. He read a newspaper while they were trying to parallel park a car for the first time in preparation for
their driving test.

If I had to tell someone’s son what a father really does that is important, it would be that he shows up for the job in good times and bad times. He’s a man who is constantly being observed by his children. They learn from him how to handle adversity, anger, disappointment and success.

He won’t laugh at their dreams no matter how impossible they might seem. He will dig out at 1 a.m. when one of his children runs out of gas. He will make unpopular decisions and stand by them. When he is wrong and makes a mistake, he will admit it. He sets the tone for how family members treat one another, members of the opposite sex and people who are different than they
are. By example, he can instill a desire to give something back to the community when its needs are greater than theirs.

But mostly, a good father involves himself in his kids’ lives. The more responsibility he has for a child, the harder it is to walk out of his life. A father has the potential to be a powerful force in the life of a child. Grab it! Maybe you’ll get a greeting card for your efforts. Maybe not. But it’s steady work.
– Erma Bombeck, Field Enterprises

God Creating the Father
When the good Lord was creating fathers he started with a tall frame. And a female angel nearby said, “What kind of father is that? If you’re going to make children so close to the ground, why have you put fathers up so high? He won’t be able to shoot marbles without kneeling, tuck a child in bed without bending, or even kiss a child without a lot of stooping.” And God smiled and said, “Yes, but if I make him child-size, who would children have to look up to?”

And when God made a father’s hands, they were large and sinewy. And the angel shook her head sadly and said, “Do you know what you’re doing? Large hands are clumsy. They can’t manage diaper pins, small buttons, rubber bands on pony tails or even remove splinters caused by baseball bats.” And God smiled and said, “I know, but they’re large enough to hold everything a small boy empties from his pockets at the end of a day…yet small enough to cup a child’s face in his hands.”

And then God molded long, slim legs and broad shoulders. And the angel nearly had a heart attack. “Boy, this is the end of the week, all right,” she clucked. “Do you realize you just made a father without a lap? How is he going to pull a child close to him without the kid falling between his legs?” And God smiled and said, “A mother needs a lap. A father needs strong shoulders to pull a sled, balance a boy on a bicycle, and hold a sleepy head on the way home from the circus.”

God was in the middle of creating two of the largest feet anyone had every seen when the angel could contain herself no longer. “That’s not fair. Do you honestly think those large boats are going to dig out of bed early in the morning when the baby cries? Or walk through a small birthday party without crushing at least three of the guests?” And God smiled and said, “They’ll work. You’ll see. They’ll support a small child who wants to ride a horse to Banbury Cross, or scare off mice at the summer cabin, or display shoes that will be a challenge to fill.”

God worked throughout the night, giving the Father few words, but a firm authoritative voice; eyes that saw everything, but remained calm and tolerant. Finally, almost as an afterthought, he added tears. Then he turned to the angel and said, “Now, are you satisfied that he can love as much as a Mother?” The angel shuteth up.
– Erma Bombeck

The Father’s Blessing
Gary Smalley, popular author and psychologist, asked 100 people, “What is one specific way you knew that you had received your parents’ blessing?” Here some of those answers:

1. “My father would put his arm around me at church and let me lay my head on his shoulder.”
2. “When my father was facing being transferred at work, he purposely took another job so that I could finish my senior year in high school at the same school.”
3. “When I wrecked my parent’s car, my father’s first reaction was to hug me and let me cry instead of yelling at me.”
4. “When I was thirteen, my dad trusted me to use his favorite hunting rifle when I was invited to go hunting with a friend and his father.”
5. “My father went with me when I had to take back an ugly dress a saleswoman had talked me into buying.”
6. “My father would let me practice pitching to him for a long time when he got home from work.”
7. “Even though I had never seen him cry before, my father cried during my wedding because he was going to miss me no longer being at home.”

Twelve Practical Ways for Men to Impact Fatherless Kids

1. Be a mentor to a boy without a father through Big Brother or some other agency.
2. Contact your local junior or senior high school to tutor a needy kid.
3. Teach Sunday School.
4. Adopt a child or be a foster parent.
5. Meet one-on-one weekly, with a boy in your church or neighborhood who doesn’t have a father in the home.
6. Become a leader in Boy Scouts or Cub Scouts.
7. Coach Little League or some other sport.
8. Volunteer to work with needy kids in an inner city ministry.
9. Hire a potentially “at risk” kid for yard work or in your business.
10. Become active youth leaders in your local church or a parachurch organization.
11. Start a church-based sports league that reaches out to needy kids in the community.
12. Lead a Bible study in a juvenile detention center or group home.
– June 1996 issue of The Standard (pp 20-23), published by the Baptist General Conference, 2002 S. Arlington Heights Rd., Arlington Heights, IL. Adapted

Get Rid of Dad?
The children begged for a hamster, and after the usual fervent vows that they alone would care for it, they got one. They named it Danny. Two months later, when Mom found herself responsible for cleaning and feeding the creature, she located a prospective new home for it. The children took the news of Danny’s imminent departure quite well, though one of them remarked, “He’s been around here a long time–we’ll miss him.”

“Yes,” Mom replied, “But he’s too much work for one person, and since I’m that one person, I say he goes.”

Another child offered, “Well, maybe if he wouldn’t eat so much and wouldn’t be so messy, we could keep him.”

But Mom was firm. “It’s time to take Danny to his new home now,” she insisted. “Go and get his cage.”

With one voice and in tearful outrage the children shouted, “Danny? We thought you said Daddy!”
– Ken Board

Dusty Like Dad
“At the first church that I pastored, I had the job of mixing feed to supplement my income. For a period of about two weeks, each day that I came home from work, my two boys, ages 2 and 3 would look at me, smile, and would say, “Boy, dad, you sure are dusty!” I would reply, “Yes, I sure am dusty.” Then I would get cleaned up.

I didn’t think too much of this until I was washing my car and saw my oldest son doing something very strange. He was picking up the gravel and stones that were in our drive and rubbing them into his pants. I asked him, “Want are you doing?” He replied, “I want to be dusty like you dad!”

I realized that if a child would look up to his father for being dusty and want to copy his father, a child could look up to his father and follow him for anything. What are you passing on to your son?”
– Jerry L. Steen

“I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.”
– Sigmund Freud[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]