quotations about men
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
I don't know what a man is. Only that every man has his price.
BERTOLD BRECHT
The Exception and the Rule
There is nothing alive more agonized than man of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.
HOMER
The Iliad
The hardest man ... is but a shell.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
A controlling man, surely a mythical creature?
E. L. JAMES
Fifty Shades Darker
I do like men who come out frankly and own that they are not gods.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Jo's Boys
It is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system does not want men. They are not safe.
PAUL GOODMAN
Growing Up Absurd
Wherever comes man comes tragedy and comedy also.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in Man.
JOHN DRYDEN
A Song for St. Cecilia's Day
Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
Crime and Punishment
Man is not only the supreme result of evolution thus far, -- he is the final result of evolution; there is nothing beyond him. If one asks, How do we know that there may not be something inconceivable to us beyond? the answer is, We cannot know; but in our attempt to unriddle the enigma of the universe we must think with our faculties and be governed by our limitations, and we can conceive nothing higher than man. We can conceive of man infinitely improved; we can conceive of him cultivated, developed, enlarged, enriched, purified; but of anything essentially higher than man -- no. Nothing can be conceived higher than to think, to will, to love. If we look back along the pages of history, these two truths we have learned from the universe: first, that all its processes have been for the purpose of manifesting One who thinks, who wills, who loves; second, that the purpose in the manifestation of this One is the creation of a race of free moral agents, who can themselves think and will and love. The inorganic world existed before the vegetable, and the vegetable world existed before the animal, and the lower animal existed before man, but man exists for nothing beyond. The very topmost round of the ladder has been reached: to know right from wrong, to do the right and eschew the wrong, to understand invisible distinctions, to perceive the invisible world, to struggle toward something higher and yet higher, and yet always to know, to resolve, to love, -- this is supreme.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
The world in the evening seems fraught with the absence of promise, if you are a married man. There is nothing to do but go home and drink your nine drinks and forget about it.
DONALD BARTHELME
"Critique de la Vie Quotidienne"
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
If man looks within himself he must perceive two things: a law of right, and that which it condemns.
HENRY PARRY LIDDON
Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford
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
A man was like a child with his appetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very pleasant connection.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
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
A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
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
No man ever reaches manhood
till a woman's tenderness
Is a part of his possession.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Conquerors"