Most every man competes with his father and imitates his father, lives in fear of disappointing, and craves approval, and on the extreme ends of this potentially fraught relationship, a man often spends his entire adult life trying to be exactly like his father or nothing like him.

Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father's expectations or make up for their father's mistakes....

Such a resemblance has to be through a natural way. You cannot succeed in resembling anyone, even if that man is your father. I was simply born like this. I did not have any intention to be similar to my father. For me, it is a big burden. People used to tell us it would be very easy for me to succeed because I am the son of Sihanouk. People adore the king and I look like him. It is not my achievement they are remembering, but the deeds of my father. On the contrary, if I fail the people would say, 'Oh you are the son, but you are not like your father'. It's rather a burden.

You can certainly argue that, philosophically, that is not your father. That is a replica, but I can actually make a strong case that it would be more like my father than my father would be, were he to live.

My father confused me about what it meant to become a man. From an early age, I knew I didn’t want to be anything like the man he was. PAT CONROY, My Reading Life

I didn’t want to be the kind of man that my father was. So I’ve tried, my entire life, to be the complete and utter opposite of that. And it has served not only the art well, but I think the audience well.

A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.

If you’re an adult male who sees no flaws in his father, you’re an insane person.

It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself.

man must love his father and yet be free of his father’s expectations and criticisms in order to be a free man.

I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.

By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong. life-quotes.co

The good son imitates the father with such passion that father and son become each other's chief stumbling block - a situation the indifferent son more easily avoids.

When your father is alive, observe his will. When your father is dead observe his former actions. If, for three years [after the death of your father] you do not change from the ways of your father, you can be called a 'real son (xiào/hsiao)'.