Happy Father's Day!

Want to do a little psychology experiment?  Research quotes on mothers.  Here's what you'll find - Sincerity.  Heartfelt gratitude.  Infrequently, a bit of humor.  

Now, research quotes on fathers... 

Little resemblance.  Platitudes about fathers, especially when coming from sons, are overwhelmingly funny or, opposite, unemotional, as though discussing what an essential, demanding, most-productive branch of government the Department of Father is.

To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.

-Ernest Hemingway

Whoever does not have a good father should procure one.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

  
You don't have to deserve your mother's love.  You have to deserve your father's.

- Robert Frost

  

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.

-Sigmund Freud 

I was a little offended at first.  Not that I don't see the truth in these, but I was looking for more.  These are our dads we're talking about.  It's Father's Day.  Where was the gushing?  My feminine sensibilities were piqued and protective of good fathers.  I'll dig deeper, I thought, until I find fitting tributes.  But then I realized, what could be more fitting or important - Fathers give us our sense of humor.  Fathers are essential and productive.  Fathers teach us that we need to earn respect; that it is not a given.  They inspire ambition.  They teach us how to work hard and to think beyond our own needs to those of the people depending on us.  They teach their sons how to be good men.  They teach their daughters how men should treat them.

I wouldn't be the same me without mine.  Thank you for all of it, Dad.  I love you.

I just owe almost everything to my father and it's passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.   

-Margaret Thatcher

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

-Maria Cuomo

 Happy Father's Day!  To my husband, you are why I kept digging.  But, a whole book of quotes could not encompass all you are to our children.  Only our boundless hearts can do that.  And they do.

~M.M. Finck