quotations about men
Men simply weren't worth the effort. They expected a great deal of support, both physical and emotional, and seemed to think that a few moments a week of sexual gratification should suffice to keep a woman happy.
JOHN SAUL
Midnight Voices
Men are different. Yet they are people, too. Women's physical and emotional characteristics and sufferings have been studied, written about and mulled over--and over. By contrast, the problems particularly affecting men are neglected--even by themselves.
JOAN GOMEZ
Psychological and Psychiatric Problems in Men
Man, being the strongest of all animals, differs from the rest; he was obliged to be his own domesticator; he had to tame himself.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
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
Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Raising the Wind", Saturday Courier, October 14, 1843
If I laugh at you, O fellow-men! if I trace with curious interest your labyrinthine self-delusions, note the inconsistencies in your zealous adhesions, and smile at your helpless endeavours in a rashly chosen part, it is not that I feel myself aloof from you: the more intimately I seem to discern your weaknesses, the stronger to me is the proof that I share them. How otherwise could I get the discernment?--for even what we are averse to, what we vow not to entertain, must have shaped or shadowed itself within us as a possibility before we can think of exorcising it. No man can know his brother simply as a spectator. Dear blunderers, I am one of you.
GEORGE ELIOT
Theophrastus Such
I don't understand men. I don't even understand what I don't understand about men.
MAUREEN DOWD
Are Men Necessary?
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
All the windy ways of men
Are but dust that rises up,
And is lightly laid again.
ALFRED TENNYSON
The Vision of Sin
A man is nothing but breath and shadow.
SOPHOCLES
fragment, Ajax the Locrian
Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!
GEORGE CHAPMAN
To the Countess of Cumberland
The right boys i always toss and the wrong ones i keep on top of me like paperweights.
DANIEL HANDLER
Adverbs
Some of the wildest men make the best pets.
MAE WEST
Belle of the Nineties
Men are always ready to die for us, but not to make our lives worth having. Cheap sentiment and bad logic.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Jo's Boys
Few women think a man complete without vice.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
But man crouches and blushes,
Absconds and conceals;
He creepeth and peepeth,
He palters and steals;
Infirm, melancholy,
Jealous glancing around,
An oaf, an accomplice,
He poisons the ground.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Sphinx
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
Man is said to be a rational creature; but should it not rather be said, that man is a creature capable of being rational, as we say a parrot is a creature capable of speech?
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters and Reflections
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
I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury