Frank Pittman Quotes

Bad marriages don't cause infidelity; infidelity causes bad marriages.

The secret to having a good marriage is to understand that marriage must be total, it must be permanent, and it must be equal.

Love is not something people feel, but something people try to express no matter how they feel.

The more things we can laugh about, the more alive we become: The more things we can laugh about together, the more connected we become.

Fidelity is the single most important element in solidly enduring marriages.

Marriage, like a submarine, is only safe if you get all the way inside.

Fathering makes a man, whatever his standing in the eyes of the world, feel strong and good and important, just as he makes his child feel loved and valued.

Marriage isn't supposed to make you happy - it's supposed to make you married.

Fathering is the most masculine thing a man can do.

Parents can make us distrust ourselves. To them, we seem always to be works-in-progress.

Why do otherwise sane, competent, strong men, men who can wrestle bears or raid corporations, shrink away in horror at the thought of washing a dish or changing a diaper?

Happy people learn that happiness, like sweat, is a by-product of activity.

Fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man.

Each generation's job is to question what parents accept on faith, to explore possibilities, and adapt the last generation's system of values for a new age.

. . . in the end, there is nothing a man can do that a woman can't, except be a father.

The end product of child raising is not the child but the parent.

A man doesn't have to have all the answers; children will teach him how to parent them, and in the process will teach him everything he needs to know about life.

For most people, a life lived alone, with passing strangers or passing lovers, is incoherent and ultimately unbearable. Someone must be there to know what we have done for those we love.

Nothing is quite so horrifying and paralyzing as to win the Oedipal struggle and to be awarded your mother as the prize.

Character, not passion keeps marriages together long enough to do their work of raising children into mature, responsible, productive citizens.

If fathers who fear fathering and run away from it could only see how little fathering is enough. Mostly, the father just needs to be there.

We know how powerful our mother was when we were little, but is our wife that powerful to us now? Must we relive our great deed of escape from Mama with every other woman in our life?

Becoming Father the Nurturer rather than just Father the Provider enables a man to fully feel and express his humanity and his masculinity. Fathering is the most masculine thing a man can do.

No one, however powerful and successful, can function as an adult if his parents are not satisfied with him.

When it comes to little girls, God the father has nothing on father, the god. It's an awesome responsibility.

Parents have to get over the idea that their children belong just to them; children are a family affair.

The most likely cause of a man's depression is his failure to be the man he thinks he should be

A boy is not free to find a partner of his own as long as he must be the partner to his mother.

At the heart of the matter of masculine excess is a great longing for the love and approval of a father, a man who can tell another man that his masculinity is splendid enough and he can now relax.