Dad Acrostic Dictums: An acrostic is generally a poem or phrase in which the first letters spell out a word. It will soon be Father’s Day. How many of these old sayings apply to you? How many apply to your dad? Acrostics below were created by Don Mathis; axioms were written by children and fathers across history. 

Dads Are Different
For rarely are sons similar to their fathers: most are worse, and a few are better than their fathers. – Homer

Discover A Dictum
It’s only when you grow up, and step back from him, or leave him for your own career and your own home — it’s only then that you can measure his greatness and fully appreciate it. – Margaret Truman

Dreams And Designs
When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes,
I was your son, high on your horse,
My mind a top whipped by the lashes
Of your rhetoric, windy of course.
– Sir Stephen Spender

Dilemma At Delegation
A king, realising his incompetence, can either delegate or abdicate his duties.
A father can do neither. If only sons could see the paradox, they would understand the dilemma. – Marlene Dietrich

Dearer After Departure
My father died many years ago, and yet when something special happens to me, I talk to him secretly, not really knowing whether he hears, but it makes me feel better to half-believe it. – Natasha Josefowitz

Depressed At Death
Heaven is empty – Weep, children, you no longer have a father. – Gerard de Nerval

Driven As Designed
If by chance I talk a little wild, forgive me; I had it from my father.
– Henry VIII I, 4, William Shakespeare 

Delight At Deeds
As a decrepit father takes delight,
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by fortune’s dearest spite,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.
– Sonnet 37, William Shakespeare

Daughters Are Different
A father is always making his baby into a little woman.
And when she is a woman, he turns her back again. – Enid Bagnold

Delight And Disappointment
Lucky that man whose children make his happiness in life,
and not his grief, the anguished disappointment of his hopes. – Euripides

Deserving A Difference
You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love.
You have to deserve your father’s. He’s more particular. – Robert Frost

Doting And Devoted
Any man can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a dad. – Anne Geddes 

Developing, Always Developing
Fathers, like mothers, are not born. Men grow into fathers – and fathering is a very important stage in their development. – David M. Gottesman

Destiny And Design
If you think about it seriously, all the questions about the soul and the immortality of the soul and paradise and hell are at bottom only a way of seeing this very simple fact: that every action of ours is passed on to others according to its value, of good or evil, it passes from father to son, from one generation to the next, in a perpetual movement. – Antonio Gramsci

Devoted About Daughters
The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, ‘Daddy, I need to ask you something,’ he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan. – Garrison Keillor

Deep And Discerning
My father said, “Politics asks the question: Is it expedient? Vanity asks: Is it popular? But conscience asks: Is it right?” – Dexter Scott King, son of Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Design A Destiny
I don’t know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be. – Abraham Lincoln

Duty And Discipline
My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it. – Abraham Lincoln

Delight At Discernment
A wise son maketh a glad father. – Proverbs 10:1

Dowers Are Desirable
Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance. – Ruth E. Renkel

Duty And Dedication
Father taught us that opportunity and responsibility go hand in hand. I think we all act on that principle; on the basic human impulse that makes a man want to make the best of what’s in him and what’s been given him. – Laurence Rockefeller

Devoted And Despised
That is the thankless position of the father in the family – the provider for all, and the enemy of all. – J. August Strindberg

Difference At Distance
For thousands of years, father and son have stretched wistful hands across the canyon of time, each eager to help the other to his side, but neither quite able to desert the loyalties of his contemporaries. The relationship is always changing and hence always fragile; nothing endures except the sense of difference. – Alan Valentine

Duel Across Decades
By the time a man realises that maybe his father was right,
he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong. – Charles Wadsworth

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Image courtesy of Adobe.