Here at Adoption & Beyond, we care about fathers as much as we care about mothers. With Father’s Day on Sunday, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank each and every birth father and adoptive father who has worked with us in the past. You’ve truly made our journey an incredible one.

To keep the love going, here are 15 good father quotes: one quote for every year we’ve been working alongside birth and adoptive fathers alike.

Father’s Day Quotes

1. “I’ve had a hard life, but my hardships are nothing against the hardships that my father went through in order to get me to where I started.”
– Bartrand Hubbard

2. “Dads are most ordinary men turned by love into heroes, adventures, story-tellers, and singers of songs.”
– Pam Brown

3. “My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, ‘You’re tearing up the grass.’ ‘We’re not raising grass,’ Dad would reply. ‘We’re raising boys.'”
– Harmon Killebrew

4. “It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.”
– Johann Friedrich von Schiller

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

6. “[He] adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector.”
– Tom Wolfe

7. “[My father] didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.”
– Clarence B. Kelland

8. “To a small child, the perfect granddad is unafraid of big dogs and fierce storms but absolutely terrified of the word ‘boo.'”
– Robert Brault

9. “When my father didn’t have my hand . . . he had my back.”
– Linda Poindexter

10. “Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.”
– Bill Cosby

11. “A grandfather is someone with silver in his hair and gold in his heart.”
– Unknown

12. “By choice, we have become a family, first in our hearts, and finally in breath and being. Great expectations are good; great experiences are better.”
– Richard Fischer

13. “Dad, your guiding hand on my shoulder will remain with me forever.”
– Unknown

14. “My father gave me the greatest gift anyone can give another person, he believed in me.”
– Jim Valvano

15. “Nothing I’ve ever done has given me more joys and rewards than being a father to my children.”
– Bill Cosby