quotations about men
What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.
SYLVIA PLATH
The Bell Jar
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever--
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Much Ado About Nothing
Where soil is, men grow,
Whether to weeds or flowers.
JOHN KEATS
Endymion
All the wide world is but the husbandry of God for the development of the one fruit--man.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Some men are like a church-organ--you can play on them for a lifetime and always find new harmonies; others are like a music-box--they have four or five thin jingles.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Men changed whatever they set hand to. They wrought their magic on beasts, to make them dull and patient. They brought fire and the reek of smoke to the dales. They brought lines and order to the curve of the hills. Most of all they brought the chill of iron, to sweep away the ancient shadows.
C. J. CHERRYH
The Dreamstone
Men are foolish to expect us to revere them, when, in the end, they amount to almost nothing.
PAULINE RÉAGE
introduction, The Image
Alas! What is man? Whether he be deprived of that light which is from on high, of whether he discard it, a frail and trembling creature; standing on time, that bleak and narrow isthmus between two eternities, he sees nothing but impenetrable darkness on the one hand, and doubt, distrust, and conjecture, still more perplexing, on the other. Most gladly would he take an observation, as to whence he has come, or whither he is going; alas, he has not the means: his telescope is too dim, his compass too wavering, his plummet too short.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
GASTON BACHÉLARD
The Psychoanalysis of Fire
In the ardor of his enthusiasm, a youth set forth in quest of a man of whom he might take counsel as to his future, but after long search and many disappointments, he came near relinquishing the pursuit as hopeless, when suddenly it occurred to him that one must first be a man to find a man, and profiting by this suggestion, he set himself to the work of becoming himself the man he had been seeking so long and fruitlessly.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
Crime and Punishment
Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite of him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Sartor Resartus
Man becomes virtually an automaton in the loss of his individuality and responsibility. He is the harp of a thousand strings played upon by a divine hand, but not a man!
JOHN GRIER HIBBEN
The Problems of Philosophy
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
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
Men do communicate, often very directly, but women sometimes cannot accept how simple what we have to say is. We seldom play games--we aren't that sophisticated.
CHRIS ABANI
"What Men Aren't Telling Us", O Magazine, July 2008
Again Creb grunted. It was the usual noncommittal comment used by men when responding to a woman. It carried only enough meaning to indicate the woman had been understood, without acknowledging too much significance in what she said.
JEAN M. AUEL
The Clan of the Cave Bear
I don't understand men. I don't even understand what I don't understand about men.
MAUREEN DOWD
Are Men Necessary?
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man",
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Conqueror Worm"
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