quotations about men
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
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
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
Where soil is, men grow,
Whether to weeds or flowers.
JOHN KEATS
Endymion
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 an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Raising the Wind", Saturday Courier, October 14, 1843
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
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
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
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
Few women think a man complete without vice.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
Men would like monogamy better if it sounded less like monotony.
RITA RUDNER
stand-up routine
What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.
MARK TWAIN
Mark Twain on Common Sense
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 might be better if we better deemed
Of them. The worst way to improve the world
Is to condemn it.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Festus
I do like men who come out frankly and own that they are not gods.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Jo's Boys
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 grows used to everything, the scoundrel.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
Crime and Punishment
A controlling man, surely a mythical creature?
E. L. JAMES
Fifty Shades Darker