quotations about men
Men, like musical instruments, seem made to be played upon.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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 never try to pass themselves off for that which they are not, unless they expect to accomplish something desirable thereby.
J. B. RIPLEY
Plain Words to Young Men
There is a moment when you are alone with a man and you both realize it. Alone together, there are always possibilities in that. There is a nearly painful awareness of each other. It can lead to awkwardness, to sex, or to fear, depending on the man and the situation.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Guilty Pleasures
There is no beast more cruel than man.
LEONID ANDREYEV
Savva
What woman would not gladly perform a painful pilgrimage, if so she could but find her Jove, and then fall down and worship him! Alas! the actual Jupiters are very scarce.
MARY CLEMMER AMES
Outlines of Men, Women, and Things
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
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
If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle.
RITA MAE BROWN
Sudden Death
I am a man. This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mind to kneel before!
AYN RAND
Anthem
The Spirit of man is like a kite, which rises by means of those very forces which seem to oppose its rise; the tie that joins it to the earth, the opposing winds of temptation, and the weight of earth-born affections which it carries with it into the sky.
COVENTRY PATMORE
The Rod, the Root, and the Flower
I take it that "gentleman" is a term that only describes a person in his relation to others; but when we speak of him as "a man", we consider him not merely with regard to his fellow men, but in relation to himself, -- to life -- to time -- to eternity. A cast-away lonely as Robinson Crusoe -- a prisoner immured in a dungeon for life -- nay, even a saint in Patmos, has his endurance, his strength, his faith, best described by being spoken of as "a man". I am rather weary of this word "gentlemanly" which seems to me to be often inappropriately used, and often too with such exaggerated distortion of meaning, while the full simplicity of the noun "man", and the adjective "manly" are unacknowledged.
ELIZABETH GASKELL
North and South
No matter what dimension you're in, there's a big-headed male trying to take over the world.
EOIN COLFER
The Lost Colony
Even the most staid and respectable husband likes for his wife to think he is a devil among the women.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
If it be true that God and man are in one image or likeness (and the affirmation that they are so is not unplausible) then it is the duty of man to bring out into its full splendor that Divine Image which is latent, on one side, in the complexity of his own nature.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
The Blazing Star
Man, if he compare himself with all that he can see, is at the zenith of power; but if he compare himself with all that he can conceive, he is at the nadir of weakness.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Man is improvable.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Übermensch--a rope over an abyss.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
After thousands of centuries of vain efforts to come back to itself, Divinity, lost and scattered in the matter which it animates and sets in motion, finds a point of support, a sort of focus for self-concentration. This focus is man, his immortal soul singularly imprisoned in a mortal body. But each man considered individually is infinitely too limited, too small, to enclose the divine immensity; it can contain only a very small particle, immortal like the whole, but infinitely smaller than the whole. It follows that the divine being, the absolutely immaterial being, mind, is divisible like matter. Another mystery whose solution must be left to faith.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Man is nothing but surprise, contradiction, incoherence, and folly.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid