Quotes about man
page 40
“I suppose if a man has something once, always something of it remains.”
Source: For Whom the Bell Tolls
As quoted in D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers (1996) by Leo Hamalian, p. 90
Source: Delta of Venus
“A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.”
Blood Meridian (1985)
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
“The man with no imagination has no wings.”
“No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.”
The monster to Robert Walton
Source: Frankenstein (1818)
Context: I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.
Context: I seek not a fellow feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone while my sufferings shall endure; when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.
“I’d rather be short, fat, and ugly than take after that man. (Nick)”
Source: Infinity
“The man is always the last to know when
Cupid has struck him
-Anonymous, Memoirs of a Mistress”
Source: One Night with a Prince
“What kind of man refers to himself as safely dead?”
“As a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.”
Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 22 (p. 170)
Misattributed
“I have heard an atheist defined as a man who had no invisible means of support.”
A play on words commonly used referring to vagrants or paupers as having "no visible means of support" financially, speaking to the Law Society of Upper Canada, (21 February 1936); published in Canadian Occasions (1940), p. 201. Buchan's source for this definition remains unknown. The witticism was repeated by Harry Emerson Fosdick in his On Being a Real Person (1943), ch. 1, with due acknowledgement to Buchan, and was again used by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen in Look magazine (December 14, 1955). The credit for this line is therefore often wrongly given to Fosdick or to Sheen. Credit has also been given to the conductor Walter Damrosch (1862-1950).
Canadian Occasions (1940)
July 14, 1763, p. 121
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I
Source: The Life of Samuel Johnson, Vol 2
“Will you take me as I am? Strung out on another man… California, I'm comin' home.”
"Selections from the Allen Notebooks".
Source: Without Feathers (1975)
“How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?”
Source: A Lesson Before Dying
“Never give a sword to a man who can't dance.”
Source: The Analects
“There is no worse flaw in man's character than that of wanting to belong.”
Source: Mercy Among the Children
“Any healthy man can go without food for two days--but not without poetry.”
“You are a sick, sick man,” I told him.
“Thank you,” Ben replied, looking modest.”
Source: Silver Borne
“If a man smiles all the time, he’s probably selling something that doesn’t work.”
“It seems to be a fact that man, tortured by his demons, avenges himself blindly on his fellow-man.”
Source: Letters to Milena
“For life makes no mistakes and always gives man that which man first gives himself.”
Source: The Law and Other Essays on Manifestation
Source: Dearly Devoted Dexter
Source: A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat
Source: God Emperor of Dune
“A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right.”
1960s, Address on Courage (1965)
Context: Deep down in our nonviolent creed is the conviction that there are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true that they’re worth dying for. And if a man happens to be 36 years old, as I happen to be, and some great truth stands before the door of his life, some great opportunity to stand up for that which is right, he’s afraid his home will get burned, or he’s afraid that he will lose his job, or he’s afraid that he will get shot or beat down by state troopers. He may go on and live until he’s 80, but he’s just as dead at 36 as he would be at 80. And the cessation of breathing in his life is merely the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. He died...
A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.
So we're going to stand up right here amid horses. We're going to stand up right here, in Alabama, amid the billy-clubs. We're going to stand up right here in Alabama amid police dogs, if they have them. We're going to stand up amid tear gas! We're going to stand up amid anything they can muster up, letting the world know that we are determined to be free!
“I lived like a man who wanted to die but who had no courage to do it himself.”
Source: Interview with the Vampire
“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”
Source: War and Peace
Source: Hard Day's Knight
Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
Variant: If you want to communicate an idea to a man's brain, talk to him through his pecker. It's like an ear horn, y'all.
Source: Lothaire
“… A man can only stumble for so long before he either falls or stands up straight.”
Source: The Well of Ascension
“No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.”
Source: Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul
“A silent man is a thinking man. A silent woman is an angry one …”
Source: Styxx
“It is your attitude about yourself that a man will adopt.”
Source: Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship
Source: Magic Burns
“A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.”
“Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”
Source: Man for Himself (1947), Ch. 3
Context: The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
“A man may be so much of every thing, that he is nothing of any thing.”
1783, p. 500
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol IV
Source: The Life of Johnson, Vol 4
Source: The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of Americas Wealthy
Source: Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
Source: The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo
“An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.”
Source: The King Must Die (1958)
No. 19, To His Mistress Going to Bed
Elegies
Source: The Complete English Poems
“If a man doesn't know how to dance he doesn't know how to make love, there I said it!”
Source: 1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
“A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.”
George Bernard Shaw, quoted by Hesketh Pearson, George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality, 1942
1940s and later
1930s, Wisehart interview (1930)
Context: Much reading after a certain age diverts the mind from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theaters is apt to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.
Sane Man (1989)
Context: Rick Astley? Have you seen this banal incubus at work? Boy, if this guy isn't heralding Satan's imminent approach to Earth, huh. "Don't ever wanna make you cry, never wanna make you sigh … never gonna break your heart" … oh, I wouldn't worry about that without a dick, buddy. You got a corn nut! You got a clit! You're not even a guy! You're an AIDS germ that got off a slide! They're puttin' music to AIDS germs, they're puttin' a drum machine behind them in a metronome beat and Ted Turner's colorizing 'em, God damn it! These aren't even people man! It's a CIA plot to make you think malls are good!! Don't ya see? (Imitates stereotypical American in a robotic manner) "But Bill, malls are good! Malls allow us to shop 365 days of the year at a 72 degree heat. That must be good."
“I'm normally not a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me, Superman.
Homer Simpson”
“I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.”
Je dirais qu'il faut agir en homme de pensée et penser en homme d'action.
Speech at the Descartes Conference http://books.google.com/books?id=BynXAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Je+dirais+qu'il+faut+agir+en+homme+de+pens%C3%A9e+et+penser+en+homme+d'action%22&pg=PA1579#v=onepage in Paris (1937)
Quoted in The Forbes Scrapbook of Thoughts on the Business of Life (1950), p. 442, as "Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought."
Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
“For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing.”
Source: Night Film