Define Father Quotes & Sayings

My father instilled in me - of utmost importance and innate in me is the yearning to determine for myself - to define God, to define holiness for myself. — Vera Farmiga

We define ourselves in relationship to Christ: who we are is how we relate to him. The Son, sent by the Father, lives in us through the Holy Spirit, and we can't truly meet ourselves until we meet him. — Adam S. McHugh

One of the most important lessons the Lord has taught me is that you are not your gift. That is, you are not defined by what you do or create. Jesus is a wonderful example of this. He would not allow the crowd to define Him by His considerable gifts, even though they tried to do so. Jesus always points away from Himself and His gifts and thereby wins praise for the Father. We are not our gifts. We are called to give more. Like Jesus, we are called to give ourselves. That is the real purpose behind our gifts; they are vehicles for giving the self. — Michael Card

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them - a mother's approval, a father's nod - are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives. — Mitch Albom

Daughter, your presence is a stay and consolation to me. Begin again in the Tenth Book; tell me, how does Aristotle define true happiness?" "Father, he tells us that true happiness is found in contemplation, whereas the common idea of happiness as pleasant amusements is fostered by the courts of tyrants. — Judith Merkle Riley

Before doing 'Midnight's Children,' I didn't really have a chance to explore my Indian side. The Indian side of my heritage was always present, but it did not particularly define my identity. Being English was more an identity-defining status. I was born and brought up in London. Yes, my father is Parsi. — Satya Bhabha

I will never be someone's last choice, second option, narcissistic supply, doormat, ego booster, sidekick, secret, last time or after thought. I am a Daughter of God that stands for truth. I know my beauty, my talents, my accomplishments, what I have to offer and who leads my life purpose: my Heavenly Father. But, most of all I know my value and I will never let any man define my worth. — Shannon L. Alder

When I was a child, the lessons my father taught me had been about perseverance, never to accept limitations that stood in my way. As an adult, watching him in his final years, I also saw how to come to terms with limits that couldn't simply be wished away. When to shift from pushing against limits to making the best of them is not often readily apparent. But it is clear that are times when the cost of pushing exceeds its value. Helping my father through the struggle to define that moment was simultaneously among the most painful and most privileged experiences of my life. Part of the way my father handled the limits he faced was by looking at them without illusion. Though his circumstances sometimes got him down, he never pretended they were better than they were. He always understood that life is short and one's place in the world is small. But he also saw himself as a link in a chain of history. — Atul Gawande

To whom do I owe the power behind my voice, what strength I have become, yeasting up like sudden blood from under the bruised skin's blister?
My father leaves his psychic print upon me, silent, intense, and unforgiving. But his is a distant lightning. Images of women flaming like torches adorn and define the borders of my journey, stand like dykes between me and the chaos. It is the images of women, kind and cruel, that lead me home. — Audre Lorde

Rationalizing him and the glass pipe, Dad smoked crack, but he was not a crackhead; it was just something he did. To do something didn't define you, I thought.
I saw Dad through a dusty lens that distorted our relationship, as tarnished as his pipe. He was no longer just our father; he was his own person, with an identity and label and body separate from his relationship with us. He was someone who was judged outside of the lens of fatherhood, outside of our connection. When he was in the streets, he was not Dad. He was Charlie the crackhead. — Janet Mock

Never let something so unworthy define you. — Katherine Reay

Discussion of how California has 'changed,' then, tends locally to define the more ideal California as that which existed at whatever past point the speaker first saw it: Gilroy as it was in the 1960s and Gilroy as it was fifteen years ago and Gilroy as it was when my father and I ate short ribs at the Milias Hotel are three pictures with virtually no overlap, a hologram that dematerializes as I drive through it. — Joan Didion

Years later, my father made a passing reference to the uncanny-valley response - the human aversion to things that look almost but not quite like people. The uncanny-valley response is a hard thing to define, much less to test for. But if true, it explains why the faces of chimps so unsettle some of us. — Karen Joy Fowler

You could have Charles Manson as a father and end up a saint; you could have Mother Theresa as a mother and end up a serial killer. At the end of the day, you define the person you become. Not a strand of DNA. Not the parents you didn't get to choose. You." I — Julie Johnson

Haven, don't ask me to define the boundaries of normal. You know how I was raised. My father once struck strands of his own pubic hair onto a painting and sold it for a million dollars. — Lisa Kleypas

Of course it is fine to highlight any group that you feel is important. But it's becoming impossible to define that group as "oppressed," because now every group claims to be oppressed, and none admit they are oppressors. White males used to be the bad guys, but now even they have caught the fever. White males are no longer a single group that can be blamed for oppression, because most of them now claim to belong to an oppressed or marginalized group themselves: they are drug addicts, physically handicapped, alcoholics, were sexually abused as a child, victims of an absent father, abducted by aliens, or turned into "success objects" by women. They can't oppress anybody because they are too busy being oppressed themselves. Besides, — Ken Wilber

It's natural for children to drift through their early childhood taking their parents for granted, then adolescence rears its ugly head and insouciance morphs into rebellion as they strive to define themselves by being as different from those who gave them life as possible. But for me, now on the eve of my sixteenth year, familial insurrection had yet to seize me - and in reality, it never would. I was my father's son. His moral compass was inexorably mine. I knew that day I would forever define myself not by contrasts to my father, but by emulation, striving to be a "good man" like him. But the term "good man" was not adequate to describe him. Daddy was a great man who charted his own course in life, guided by his own light, irrespective of the opinions of others, be they my grandmother's or those of his Brothers in the Lodge. He was the kind of man I wanted to be, the kind of man I was already becoming without fully realizing it. — G.M. Frazier

A journalist asked this to my father. He spent a day with me and interviewing my friends/colleagues and didn't understand how I could be the one that created 4chan and, as he put it, 'couldn't understand how to fit the square peg into a round hole.' The best way I have of describing it is, 'I didn't define it, and it doesn't define me.' — Christopher Poole

I began thinking about why am I constructing almost a shadow father or ghost father in my head into Graham Greene in response to the father who created me? What's going on here? I think a part of my sense is it's every boy's story. When we are kids, we imagine that to define ourselves or to find ourselves means charting your own individuality, making your own destiny and actually running away from your parents and your home and what you grew up with. — Pico Iyer

It's your storm, and the future of us all depends on you now. So who are you? Sage, an orphan boy who cares only for himself? Or the undisciplined, rebellious prince your father sent away? Life has tested your resilience and strength and willpower, and you have succeeded in ways nobody ever thought possible. But the storm has never been worse, and it will either destroy you, or define you. When everything is taken from you, can you still stand before us as Jaron, the Ascendant King of Carthya? — Jennifer A. Nielsen

Most people define themselves by what they do - 'I'm a musician.' Then one day it occurred to me that I'm only a musician when I'm playing music - or writing music, or talking about music. I don't do that 24 hours a day. I'm also a father, a son, a husband, a citizen - I mean, when I go to vote, I'm not thinking of myself as 'a musician.' — Herbie Hancock

I should no longer define myself as the son of a father who couldn't or hasn't or wouldn't or wasn't. — Cameron Conaway