quotations about men
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
Many women I know think the ideal of happiness is to be in love with a great man, or to be the wife of a great public success; to share his triumph! They forget you share the man as well!
ADA LEVERSON
Tenterhooks
There is no beast more cruel than man.
LEONID ANDREYEV
Savva
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
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
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
Even in hell, if a man was a man, you'd know it.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENET
"The Devil and Daniel Webster"
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
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 whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
North & South
Born, the Man assumes the name and image of humanity, and becomes in all things like unto other men who dwell upon the earth. Their hard lot becomes his, and his, in turn, becomes the lot of all who shall come after him. Drawn on inexorably by time, it is not given him to see the next rung on which his faltering foot shall fall. Bounded in knowledge, it is not given him to foretell what each succeeding hour, what each succeeding minute, shall have in store for him. In blind nescience, in an agony of foreboding, in a whirl of hopes and fears, he completes the cycle of an iron destiny.
LEONID ANDREYEV
The Life of Man
Women always think you need a man, you need a father, as if they'd be the slightest use. Men are a dead weight, they're clumsy and maladjusted.
YASMINA REZA
The God of Carnage
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
Most women use more brains picking a horse in the third at Belmont than they do picking a husband.
LAUREN BACALL
How to Marry a Millionaire
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
Real men don't use instructions, son. Besides, this is just the manufacturer's opinion on how to put this together.
TIM ALLEN
Home Improvement
[Man] attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Second Sex
There is so much that is deaf and dumb in man, and so much that is paralyzed, so much that is shrunken, that nothing short of a miraculous touch of re-creation can make them at death perfect beings.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
Men are like avocados. They're not ripe, they're not ripe, they're not ripe.... Then they're suddenly very ripe, and then they go bad.
RACHEL RACZKA
"Will people start becoming single again in their mid-30s? Don't count on it.", Washington Post, August 8, 2017