quotations about men
I have been thinking, my love, and on my return,
I would like to reveal the truth of us, of myself.
I am tired of this restrictive masculine role.
CHRIS ABANI
Hands Washing Water
Ah, race of mortal men,
How as a thing of nought
I count ye, though ye live;
For who is there of men
That more of blessing knows,
Than just a little while
To seem to prosper well,
And, having seemed, to fall?
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus the King
The hardest man ... is but a shell.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
Do you know how hard it is to find a decent man in this town? Most of them think monogamy is some kind of wood.
PEGGY BRANDT (AMY YASBECK)
The Mask
Man would not be the finest creature in the world if he were not too fine for it.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
We are socialized into thinking that men are like wine -- they get better with time. Women are like cheese -- they get blue veins and start to stink.
MONA CHALABI
"Why I refuse to date an older man", The Straits Times, October 22, 2017
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.
REBECCA WEST
The Thinking Reed
Men would like monogamy better if it sounded less like monotony.
RITA RUDNER
stand-up routine
The toolmakers had been remade by their own tools. For in using clubs and flints, their hands had developed a dexterity found nowhere else in the animal kingdom, permitting them to make still better tools, which in turn had developed their limbs and brains yet further. It was an accelerating, cumulative process; and at its end was Man.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
2001: A Space Odyssey
The reputation of a Don Juan gives to a man the most dangerous power. Wise virgins resist it, but foolish virgins frequently yield to the desire to take a celebrated lover from a rival -- even from a friend. This emotion is a complex one, mad up of vanity, respect for another woman's taste, and the need to establish self-assurance by winning a difficult victory. Don Juan chose his first mistresses; later he was chosen.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
An Art of Living
A man ought to carry himself in the world as an orange tree would if it could walk up and down in the garden--swinging perfume from every little censer it holds up to the air.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Man seems to be made neither to live alone nor with others.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters and Reflections
The average age at which a man marries is thirty years; the average age at which his passions, his most violent desires for genesial delight are developed, is twenty years. Now during the ten fairest years of his life, during the green season in which his beauty, his youth and his wit make him more dangerous to husbands than at any other epoch of his life, his finds himself without any means of satisfying legitimately that irresistible craving for love which burns in his whole nature. During this time, representing the sixth part of human life, we are obliged to admit that the sixth part or less of our total male population and the sixth part which is the most vigorous is placed in a position which is perpetually exhausting for them, and dangerous for society.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of all my efforts.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Religion and Science
You men never can understand ... that, however fond a woman may be of a man, there are times when he palls upon her. You don't know how I long to be able sometimes to put on my bonnet and go out, with nobody to ask me where I am going, why I am going, how long I am going to be, and when I shall be back. You don't know how I sometimes long to order a dinner that I should like, and that the children would like, but at the sight of which you would put on your hat and be off to the Club. You don't know how much I feel inclined sometimes to invite some woman here that I like, and that I know you don't; to go and see the people that I want to see, to go to bed when I am tired, and to get up when I feel I want to get up.
JEROME KLAPKA JEROME
Three Men in a Boat
This is man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He grows passionate over ideas, he hurls scorn and mockery at another's work, he finds the one way, the true way, for himself, and calls all others false--yet in the billion books upon the shelves there is not one that can tell him how to draw a single fleeting breath in peace and comfort. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destiny of the nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes.
THOMAS WOLFE
You Can't Go Home Again
Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.
JULIAN BARNES
A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
Men don't settle down because of the right woman. They settle down because they are finally ready for it. Whatever woman they're dating when they get ready is the one they settle down with, not necessarily the best one or the prettiest, just the one who happened to be on hand when the time got to be right.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
A Kiss of Shadows
They do not believe there can be tears between men. They think we are only playing a game and that we do it to shock them.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country