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
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
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
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
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
There is no beast more cruel than man.
LEONID ANDREYEV
Savva
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
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
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
Man is nothing but surprise, contradiction, incoherence, and folly.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
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
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
Even in hell, if a man was a man, you'd know it.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENET
"The Devil and Daniel Webster"
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
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
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
No matter what dimension you're in, there's a big-headed male trying to take over the world.
EOIN COLFER
The Lost Colony
I sometimes think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated His ability.
OSCAR WILDE
The Wit of Oscar Wilde
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