Father Daughter Quotes: 12 Real Lines, From Euripides to Harper Lee

The oldest line on this page is about 2,400 years old, and it is still one of the plainest things anyone has written about fathers and daughters: a girl reminding her father that she was the first to call him by that name. Most father daughter quotes online come without a source, or with one that falls apart when you look it up. The twelve below don't. Each one is given in its exact wording, with the play, novel, letter or essay it comes from and the year, and we checked every one against the full text before putting it here.

They are grouped by the stage of the relationship they fit best: the early bond, what fathers teach, letting a daughter go, the father who raised her without being her father by blood, and the years when it is hard or when he is gone. After the quotes there is a table for picking a line for a Father's Day card, a wedding or a eulogy, a short guide to making a classic line your own, and a list of popular "father daughter quotes" we left out because we could not trace them. That last section continues the work of our guide to misattributed family quotes. If you are the father writing to your daughter, daughter quotes from dad collects lines real fathers wrote to their girls in letters.

The first bond

These two lines are about the years when a father is the whole world. Both come from people who were writing about separation, which may be why they say so much in so few words.

"I was the first to call you father, you the first to call me child; I was the first to sit upon your knee and give and take the fond caress." — Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, lines 1220–1222 (staged c. 405 BC), trans. E. P. Coleridge

Iphigenia speaks these words to her father Agamemnon, who has brought her to Aulis to be sacrificed so the Greek fleet can sail for Troy. She has no weapon except memory, so she reminds him who she is to him. The full speech goes on to recall what he used to say to her: that he hoped to see her one day "living a happy prosperous life in a husband's home." Read without the tragedy around it, the first clause is one of the cleanest lines there is for a Father's Day card. It works from a daughter of any age, because it is simply true.

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"I know they will remember all I said to them, that they will be loving children to you, will do their duty faithfully, fight their bosom enemies bravely, and conquer themselves so beautifully that when I come back to them I may be fonder and prouder than ever of my little women." — Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, ch. 1 "Playing Pilgrims" (1868)

This is Mr. March's letter from the front, where he is serving as an army chaplain in the Civil War, read aloud to his four daughters by the fire. The book says that "everybody sniffed when they came to that part." It is the father's half of the bond: he doesn't praise them for anything they have done, he says he expects to be prouder still. The last clause, "fonder and prouder than ever of my little women," is a good closing line for a dad writing to a daughter who is leaving for college or a first job.

What fathers teach without a lecture

The best-known fathers in fiction teach by example more than by instruction, and their daughters only see it later. These three lines are about that kind of lesson, and about a daughter who refuses to flatter the father she loves.

"Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty / According to my bond; no more nor less." — William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1 (c. 1606)

Lear asks his three daughters to say how much they love him, so he can divide his kingdom by the answers. Goneril and Regan flatter him; Cordelia, the youngest and the one who loves him most, won't. "According to my bond" means "as a daughter owes," with nothing added for show. He disinherits her for it. The line suits a daughter who isn't one for big speeches, and it makes an honest inscription for a gift: love that doesn't need to be inflated to be real.

"Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them." — Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Part 2, ch. 31 (1960)

Near the end of the novel, Scout tells her father, Atticus Finch, that the man the town feared turned out to be "real nice." She is falling asleep as he puts her to bed, and his answer is the book's whole lesson in nine words. It is one of the few father lines in American fiction that is about how to see other people rather than about the father himself, which makes it a good choice for a daughter thanking a dad for the way he taught her to treat people.

"Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them." — Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Part 2, ch. 31 (1960)

Scout, standing on the Radley porch, finally understands something her father told her back in chapter 3. In that earlier scene Atticus puts it as "climb into his skin and walk around in it"; Scout's memory has softened it to shoes. That small difference is true to life: the lessons daughters keep are often slightly reworded versions of what their fathers actually said. "Atticus was right" is a phrase many readers have borrowed for a dad's birthday card, swapping in his name.

Letting her go: weddings and growing up

Austen gave Mr. Bennet two of the best father-to-daughter lines in English, one dry and one tender. Both are useful for a father of the bride.

"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do." — Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ch. 20 (1813)

Mrs. Bennet has demanded that her husband force Elizabeth to accept the pompous Mr. Collins. He calls Elizabeth in, lets his wife think he is on her side, and then delivers this. It is a joke, but it is also a father telling his daughter, in front of everyone, that her own choice matters more than the family's convenience. At a wedding it gets a laugh and says something true about the father, which is a rare combination for a toast.

"Well, my dear, I have no more to say. If this be the case, he deserves you. I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to anyone less worthy." — Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ch. 59 (1813)

Elizabeth has just persuaded her father that she really does love Mr. Darcy, a man he thought she disliked. His blessing is short and conditional on her happiness, not on Darcy's money. The last sentence is the most quoted, and it works almost unchanged in a father-of-the-bride speech: replace "Lizzy" with your daughter's name and say it to her, not to the room.

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The father who raised her

Not every father in a daughter's life is her father by birth. One of the strongest father daughter scenes in Victorian fiction is about exactly that, and it is a good source for stepdads, adoptive dads and the grandfathers or uncles who stepped in. (For the other side of a blended family, see our stepmom quotes and messages.)

"I can't feel as I've got any father but one." — George Eliot, Silas Marner, ch. 19 (1861)

Eppie toddled into the cottage of Silas Marner, a lonely weaver, on the night her mother died in the snow, and he raised her. Sixteen years later the wealthy Godfrey Cass reveals that he is her real father and offers her a lady's life. Eppie answers through tears with this line and says she has always imagined "a little home where he'd sit i' the corner" and she would take care of him. For a stepdad or adoptive father, it says the thing that matters in ten words, in the voice of the daughter who chose him.

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When it is hard, and when he is gone

Real father daughter relationships include anger, distance and grief, and literature is honest about all three. These lines are not card material in the usual sense, but they are what people look for when a relationship is complicated or has ended.

"How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death?" — Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Book 2, ch. 12 (1854)

Louisa Gradgrind was raised by her father on "facts" alone and married off to a man she didn't love because the arithmetic made sense. In this scene she comes home and tells him what his system cost her. Dickens doesn't let Gradgrind off, but he doesn't make him a monster either: the rest of the novel is about him learning from her. The line is for daughters who loved a father and were still hurt by him, and it shows that saying so is not a betrayal.

"Pray, do not mock me: / I am a very foolish fond old man… / For, as I am a man, I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia." / CORDELIA: "And so I am. I am." — William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 4, Scene 7 (c. 1606)

Lear, broken and half mad, wakes to find the daughter he banished caring for him, and is afraid she is mocking him. Her answer, "And so I am. I am," says "I am" twice and nothing else. It is the scene people mention when they write about a parent with dementia, or about a reconciliation after years of silence, because the daughter doesn't argue about the past. She simply tells him who she is.

"For naught is there more sweet unto an aged sire than a daughter's love; our sons are made of sterner stuff, but less winning are their caresses." — Euripides, The Suppliants, around line 1100 (c. 420s BC), trans. E. P. Coleridge

Iphis, an old man, has just lost both his son and his daughter Evadne, who threw herself onto her husband's funeral pyre. He remembers her drawing his cheek to her lips and taking his head in her hands. The line is a father's grief for a daughter, but its first half is often used the other way round, in a card from an adult daughter to an aging dad, as a way of saying "I know what I am to you."

"How poor I am, who was once so rich!" — Mark Twain, "The Death of Jean" (written December 1909)

Jean Clemens, Twain's youngest daughter, died at home on Christmas Eve 1909. He had already lost his daughter Susy and his wife. His biographer Albert Bigelow Paine wrote that Twain spent the next two days writing this essay and told him it should be the last chapter of his autobiography; Twain died four months later. A little further on he writes that he sits "writing, busying myself, to keep my heart from breaking." For a father who has lost a daughter, or a daughter writing about a father who loved her this much, nothing more polished would ring as true.

Which line for which moment

Short lines read best on cards, photos and cake toppers; longer ones work in speeches, where you can set them up. Word counts are for the part of the quote you would actually use.

How to make a classic line your own

A famous line on its own can feel borrowed. Three small moves fix that without changing the words you are quoting.

1. Swap the name, keep the rest. Austen's "my Lizzy" and Lee's "Scout" are invitations. "I could not have parted with you, my Anna, to anyone less worthy" is still recognisably Austen, and now it is about your daughter. Say where it comes from once, in the card or the toast, and nobody will mind.
2. Add one fact only you know. Follow the quote with a single specific memory: the song he played in the car, the way he checked the locks twice. One concrete detail does more than three adjectives.
3. Answer the quote. Use the line as a prompt and reply to it. For example (our own wording, not a quotation): "Euripides said a daughter was the first to call her father by that name. I'm thirty-four and I still call you first." Or, from a father: "Mr. March wanted to come home fonder and prouder. I didn't have to go anywhere. I'm both."

If you are writing for a son instead, our mother and son quotes with sources follow the same approach, and the short mother-daughter quotes are a good companion if the card is from both parents.

Popular lines we left out, and why

An earlier version of this page included several lines that turn up on almost every father daughter list. When we tried to trace them, they failed. We would rather tell you that than repeat them.

• "To her, the name of father was another name for love." Usually credited to Fanny Fern's novel Ruth Hall (1854). We searched the full Project Gutenberg text of Ruth Hall and two later Fern collections (Fern Leaves from Fanny's Port-folio, Second Series and Shadows and Sunbeams) and the sentence isn't in any of them. The nearest phrase in Ruth Hall is that "flowers were to her another name for happiness." It may come from a newspaper column we haven't seen, but until someone finds it, it is commonly attributed to Fern with no primary source found.
• The Hedy Lamarr line saying no man was ever her father's equal. It is credited to her 1966 memoir Ecstasy and Me. That book was ghostwritten by Leo Guild and Cy Rice, and Lamarr went to court over it and called its contents "fictional, false, vulgar, scandalous, libelous and obscene." Even if the line is in the book, it is not safe to present it as her own words.
• "A girl's first true love is her father." Our old version credited this to a 2012 book called Fathers and Daughters by a "Marisol Santiago" that we could not trace. As far as we can tell it is an anonymous modern saying.
• "The greatest thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother." Widely credited to Rev. Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame, and sometimes to others. We found no speech, book or interview that contains it, so we treat it as commonly attributed, no primary source found.
• Celebrity lines without a findable interview, such as the "my mother gave me my drive, but my father gave me my dreams" line credited to Liza Minnelli. We couldn't locate the original interview, so it is not on this page.

Questions people ask

What is a short father daughter quote for a card?

Eliot's "I can't feel as I've got any father but one" (10 words) and Lee's "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them" (9 words) are the shortest sourced lines here that still say something. For a six-word option, Cordelia's "And so I am. I am." works for a reconciliation or a parent with memory loss.

What does "like father, like daughter" mean?

It is a variation on the old proverb "like father, like son": the child resembles the parent, in looks, habits or temperament. It can be affectionate or teasing, and it makes an easy caption for a photo of the two of you doing the same thing. It is a saying, not a quotation, so it doesn't need a source.