quotations about men
All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Men are unwise and curiously planned.
DORIS LESSING
The Cleft: A Novel
A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.
GASTON BACHELARD
introduction, Water and Dreams
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 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
The only reason why God created man is because he was disappointed with the monkey.
MARK TWAIN
Autobiographical Dictation
Some men are born husbands; they have a passion for domesticity, for a fireside, for a home. Yet, curiously, these men very rarely stay at home. Apparently what they want is to have a place to get away from.
ADA LEVERSON
Love at Second Sight
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
Some of the wildest men make the best pets.
MAE WEST
Belle of the Nineties
Man, a wild beast, cousin of the gorilla, has emerged from the profound darkness of animal instinct into the light of the mind, which explains in a wholly natural way all his past mistakes and partially consoles us for his present errors.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
letter, 1839
Man is a living lie--a bitter jest
Upon himself--a conscious grain of sand
Lost in a desert of unconsciousness.
HENRY VAN DYKE
"The Grand Canyon"