quotations about men
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
JOHN DONNE
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
Men are cowards before women until they become tyrants.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
The Small House at Allington
Men are angels born without wings, nothing could be nicer than to be born without wings and to make them grow.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
Baltasar and Blimunda
Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.
EMIL CIORAN
The Trouble with Being Born
I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
Welcome to the mystery that is men. I think it goes something like, they grow body hair, they lose all ability to tell you what they really want.
BUFFY SUMMERS
"Phases", Buffy the Vampire Slayer
They were dressed in expensive clothes and looking at them one may think that men never lie on top of them in bed, but the assumption was totally wrong. For no matter how highly placed a woman, she's submissive to a man and for some of the women, it maybe some useless men that grunted on top of them.
KUMDONG BINDUL NOSTRA
I Will Never Trust a Man
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
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
Man seems to be made neither to live alone nor with others.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters and Reflections
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
A controlling man, surely a mythical creature?
E. L. JAMES
Fifty Shades Darker
The menfolk, they die, all right. And it's us women who walk around, like the Bible says, and mourn. The menfolk, they die, and it's over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us.
JAMES BALDWIN
Go Tell It on the Mountain
The hardest man ... is but a shell.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
Man, when viewed in separation from his Maker and his end, can be as little understood and portrayed, as a plant torn from the soil in which it grew, and cut off from communication with the clouds and sun.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING
Thoughts
Like it or not the role of masculinity is changing and many men are like a deer in headlights and don't which way to turn.
CHRIS FORTE
"Grateful: The Good Men Project Community", The Good Men Project, August 4, 2017
A hard man is good to find.
MAE WEST
attributed, She Always Knew How: Mae West, a Personal Biography
There is nothing alive more agonized than man of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.
HOMER
The Iliad
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