quotations about men
Any scheme which makes man the head and centre of all things will fail in its applications.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindu, his best friends hear no more of him.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
letter to Maria Gisborne
Men and melons are hard to know.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanack, 1733
Males. You have to lead them to the water and then show them how to slurp it.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Finisher
Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer--and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
AYN RAND
The Virtue of Selfishness
When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Their Eyes Were Watching God
I want men to admire me, but that's a trick you learn at school--a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.
ANDRE MALRAUX
attributed, The Executive's Book of Quotations
Men are like performing dogs, they love attention. The second they get less than they think they're entitled to at home, they're off in search of someone else, wagging their tail.
MARSHA
"Why do men cheat?", GQ, July 12, 2017
Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
letter, 1839
Many are the marvels of God's Creation, but none so marvelous as man. Or so cunning, for good or ill.
S. M. STIRLING
The Sunrise Lands
They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
Men would make love with any number of women ... even total strangers, while females were selective. They were catering to the demands of one small egg. While males had millions of frantic sperms screaming: "Let us out, let us out!"
WOODY ALLEN
Husbands and Wives
But man he made of angel form erect,
To hold communion with the heavens above,
And on his soul impressed his image fair,
His own similitude of holiness,
Of virtue, truth, and love; with reason high
To balance right and wrong, and conscience quick
To choose or to reject; with knowledge great,
Prudence and wisdom, vigilance and strength,
To guard all force or guile; and last of all,
The highest gift of God's abundant grace,
With perfect, free, unbias'd will. Thus man
Was made upright, immortal made, and crown'd
The king of all.
ROBERT POLLOK
The Course of Time
Man is a living lie--a bitter jest
Upon himself--a conscious grain of sand
Lost in a desert of unconsciousness.
HENRY VAN DYKE
"The Grand Canyon"
Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.
EDWARD ABBEY
"The Crooked Wood", The Journey Home
A strong man doesn't have to be dominant toward a woman. He doesn't match his strength against a woman weak with love for him. He matches it against the world.
MARILYN MONROE
My Story
Men are like pampered children, that's why women have to be more understanding and responsive to their duties at home.
SHUH
"10 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask a Second Wife", Vice, December 7, 2017
Have you never seen a strange unconnected deformed representation of a figure, which seen in another point of view, became proportioned and agreeable? It is the picture of man.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Lavinia