Quotes from Bill Cosby

Fatherhood is telling your daughter that Michael Jackson loves all his fans, but has special feelings for the ones who eat broccoli.

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.

A word to the wise ain't necessary. It's the stupid ones who need the advice.

I recently turned fifty, which is young for a tree, mid-life for an elephant, and ancient for a quarter miler, whose son now says, "Dad, I just can't run the quarter with you anymore unless I bring something to read."

Like everyone else who makes the mistake of getting older, I begin each day with coffee and obituaries.

It is a point of pride for the American male to keep the same size Jockey shorts for his entire life. And so you have a man with a brand-new 40-inch waist who is trying to get into size 36 Jockey shorts, a man who is now wearing a combination of supporter and tourniquet. Proud men have gone to the brink of gangrene to maintain the interior fashion of their youth.

When they said to you at graduation, "Follow your dream," did anybody say you have to wake up first?

Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.

The truth is that parents are not really interested in justice. They just want quiet.

"Don't worry about senility," my grandfather used to say. "When it hits you, you won't know it."

As parents, my wife and I have one thing in common. We're both afraid of children.

As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child.

If a white man falls off a chair drunk, it's just a drunk. If a Negro does, it's the whole damn Negro race.

Women don't want to hear what you think. Women want to hear what they think–in a deeper voice.

You know the only people who are always sure about the proper way to raise children? Those who've never had any.

Immortality is a long shot, I admit. But somebody has to be first.

Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.

My childhood should have taught me lessons for my own fatherhood, but it didn't because parenting can only be learned by people who have no children.

People can be more forgiving than you can imagine. But you have to forgive yourself. Let go of what's bitter and move on.

My eleven year old daughter mopes around the house all day waiting for her breasts to grow.

People will frighten you about a graduation.... They use words you don't hear often: "And we wish you Godspeed." It is a warning, Godspeed. It means you are no longer welcome here at these prices.

Yes, having a child is surely the most beautifully irrational act that two people in love can commit.

Human beings are the only creatures on earth that allow their children to come back home.