Quotes about man
page 40

“Man, he wasn't going to need a stress test anytime soon. If his heart could get through a kiss from her, he could probably run a marathon.

While dragging a car behind him.

Sideways to the road.”

Jessica Bird book Dark Lover

Source: Dark Lover

Cars, Kiss, Heart

“There was a man once who said that mothers carry the key of our souls with them all our lives. But you threw mine away”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Soul

“I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child.”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

Source: The Power of Myth

People, Feeling

“I suppose if a man has something once, always something of it remains.”

Ernest Hemingway book For Whom the Bell Tolls

Source: For Whom the Bell Tolls

“I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from man's and for which man's language was inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored. D. H. Lawrence began to give instinct a language, he tried to escape the clinical, the scientific, which only captures what the body feels.”

Anaïs Nin book Delta of Venus

As quoted in D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers (1996) by Leo Hamalian, p. 90
Source: Delta of Venus

Sex, Feeling, Sense, Box

“A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.”

Cormac McCarthy (1933) American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter

Blood Meridian (1985)
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

Source: Desert Solitaire

Feeling

“Do you believe in destiny? That even the powers of time can be altered for a single purpose? That the luckiest man who walks on this earth is the one who finds… true love?”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Source: Dracula

Love, Time

“The man with no imagination has no wings.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

Imagination, For Men

“No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

For Men

“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.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

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.

God, Angels

“I’d rather be short, fat, and ugly than take after that man. (Nick)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Infinity

“The man is always the last to know when
Cupid has struck him
-Anonymous, Memoirs of a Mistress”

Sabrina Jeffries (1960) American writer

Source: One Night with a Prince

“Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

Source: The Eternal Now

Pain, Sense, Solitude, Loneliness

“What kind of man refers to himself as safely dead?”

Megan Whalen Turner (1965) American children's writer

Dead

“As a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 22 (p. 170)

Dance

“The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Misattributed

World

“When a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country's river and streams that country is no longer fit to live in.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Drink, Country

“I have heard an atheist defined as a man who had no invisible means of support.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

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)

Support

“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

July 14, 1763, p. 121
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I
Source: The Life of Samuel Johnson, Vol 2

Reading

“Will you take me as I am? Strung out on another man… California, I'm comin' home.”

Joni Mitchell (1943) Canadian musician

Home

“The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: The Money Game

“It's a strange paradox that a man gifted with too many talents can fritter them all away without developing a single one to its full.”

Wilbur Smith book Rage

Source: Rage

“Thought: Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.”

Woody Allen Without Feathers

"Selections from the Allen Notebooks".
Source: Without Feathers (1975)

Food

“How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?”

Ernest J. Gaines A Lesson Before Dying

Source: A Lesson Before Dying

Life, God, People, Time

“Never give a sword to a man who can't dance.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Analects

Dance

“There is no worse flaw in man's character than that of wanting to belong.”

David Adams Richards (1950) Canadian writer and politician

Source: Mercy Among the Children

“Any healthy man can go without food for two days--but not without poetry.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Food

“You are a sick, sick man,” I told him.
“Thank you,” Ben replied, looking modest.”

Patricia Briggs book Silver Borne

Source: Silver Borne

“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Literature

“Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth — look at the dying man’s struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Birth, Cry

“Expectation. is the true soul of art. If you can give a man more than he expects, then he will laud you his entire life. If you can create an air of anticipation and feed it properly, you will succeed.”

Brandon Sanderson book Words of Radiance

Source: Words of Radiance

Life, Art, Soul

“The rules are the rules for a reason. Being a Shadowhunter, a good one, is about more than just training fourteen hours a day and knowing sixty-five ways of killing a man with salad tongs.”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

Way, Training

“A man can only lead when others accept him as their leader, and he has only as much authority as his subjects give to him. All of the brilliant ideas in the world cannot save your kingdom if no one will listen to them.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Well of Ascension

World, Idea

“How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.”

Charles Baudelaire book La Fanfarlo

Source: La Fanfarlo

Suffering, Memory

“If a man smiles all the time, he’s probably selling something that doesn’t work.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Smile, Time, Back To Work

“Why was man created before woman? Because you always need a rough draft before the final copy.” – Chloe Traeger”

Jill Shalvis (1963) American writer

Source: Head Over Heels

“You're mine, damn ye, Claire Fraser! Mine, and I wilna share ye, with a man or a memory, or anything whatever, so long as both shall live.”

Diana Gabaldon book Dragonfly in Amber

Source: Dragonfly in Amber

Memory

“At first she was overjoyed that he would be with her, but then she recalled that human people could not live under the water, and he could only visit her father's palace as a dead man.”

Hans Christian Andersen book The Little Mermaid

Source: The Little Mermaid

People, Water, Dead

“It seems to be a fact that man, tortured by his demons, avenges himself blindly on his fellow-man.”

Franz Kafka book Letters to Milena

Source: Letters to Milena

“For life makes no mistakes and always gives man that which man first gives himself.”

Neville Goddard (1905–1972) American author and lecturer

Source: The Law and Other Essays on Manifestation

Life

“A man who discovers his pants are on fire tends to have very little time to worry about somebody else's box of matches”

Jeff Lindsay book Dearly Devoted Dexter

Source: Dearly Devoted Dexter

Time, Box

“And from that time on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk,
Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam,
A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

Source: A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

Dreams, Star, Time, Sea

“This wise man observed that wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.”

Frank Herbert book God Emperor of Dune

Source: God Emperor of Dune

Way, Freedom, Wealth

“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”

Erich Fromm book The Art of Loving

Source: The Art of Loving (1956), Ch. 2

“A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

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 daresay Freddy might not be a great hand at slaying dragons- but one has not the smallest need of a man who can kill dragons!”

Georgette Heyer book Cotillion

Source: Cotillion

“I lived like a man who wanted to die but who had no courage to do it himself.”

Anne Rice book Interview with the Vampire

Source: Interview with the Vampire

Courage

“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

Women, Intelligence

“When man resolved to imitate walking, he invented the wheel, which does not look like a leg. In doing this, he was practicing surrealism without knowing it.”

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) French poet

“You said I am a good man," he said. "But I am not that good a man. And I am--I am catastrophically in love with you.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Love

“Yes, he is a man, so genetically he's engineered to be dense about many things, but he's not stupid.”

Katie MacAlister (1964) Author

Source: Hard Day's Knight

Stupidity

“The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

Mountain, Personality

“Come to think of it, an Aes Sedai would probably follow a man off a cliff, too, if only to explain to him - in detail - all the things he was doing incorrectly in the way he went about killing himself.”

Robert Jordan The Wheel of Time

Source: A Memory of Light

Way, Thinking

“If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.”

Niccolo Machiavelli book The Prince

Source: The Prince

Fear

“You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me?” Aunty Ifeka said. “Your life belongs to you and you alone.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book Half of a Yellow Sun

Source: Half of a Yellow Sun

Life

“If you want to communicate an idea to a man's brain, you must talk to him through his pecker. It's like an ear horn, y'all.”

Kresley Cole American writer

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

Communication, Idea

“Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!”

Angela Carter book Nights at the Circus

Source: Nights at the Circus

Marriage

“A man is an angel that has gone deranged.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

Angels

“… A man can only stumble for so long before he either falls or stands up straight.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Well of Ascension

“No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.”

David Hume (1711–1776) Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian

Source: Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul

Life

“A silent man is a thinking man. A silent woman is an angry one …”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Styxx

Thinking

“It is your attitude about yourself that a man will adopt.”

Sherry Argov (1977) American writer

Source: Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship

“The most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Source: Eleven Minutes

Way, Courage, Learning

“It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind

Flowers, Waiting

“The Oracle rose. As one, the three witches bowed.
"See?" Bran jerked his thumb at the three women. "That's how a woman should treat a man. Next time you see me, I want you to do just like them.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Burns

Women, Jerk, Time

“A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Thinking

“Never, ever regret or apologize for believing that when one man or one woman decides to risk addressing the world with truth, the world may stop what it is doing and hear. There is too much evidence to the contrary.”

Robert Fulghum (1937) American writer

Source: Maybe, Maybe Not

Truth, World

“Now I was more certain than ever of my decision. I could not love a man who did not love Jane Austen.”

Deanna Raybourn (1968) American writer

Source: Silent in the Sanctuary

Love, Decision

“Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

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.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

1783, p. 500
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol IV
Source: The Life of Johnson, Vol 4

“It's not easy having a good marriage--but I don't want easy. Easy doesn't make you grow. Easy doesn't make you think. I thank God everyday that I am married to a man who makes me think. That's my definition of true love.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Love, God, Marriage, Thinking

“Good health, longevity, happiness, a loving family, self-reliance, fine friends … if you [have] five, you’re a rich man….”

Thomas J. Stanley (1944–2015) American businessman

Source: The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of Americas Wealthy

Love, Happiness, Health, Family

“You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”

Walker Percy (1916–1990) Southern philosophical novelist

Source: Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

Age, Idea

“We… believe that art is religious, because it is one of man's highest aspirations. There is no such thing as pagan art, only good and bad art.”

Irving Stone (1903–1989) American writer

Source: The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo

Art

“An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Pleasure, Feeling, Exercises

“A man is at his youngest when he thinks he is a man, not yet realizing that his actions must show it.”

Mary Renault book The King Must Die

Source: The King Must Die (1958)

Thinking

“Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd,
My mine of precious stones, my empery;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be.”

John Donne book Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going to Bed

No. 19, To His Mistress Going to Bed
Elegies
Source: The Complete English Poems

Soul

“If a man doesn't know how to dance he doesn't know how to make love, there I said it!”

Craig Ferguson (1962) Scottish-born American television host, stand-up comedian, writer, actor, director, author, producer and voice a…

Love, Making love, Dance

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Love, Pleasure, Music, Nature

“Man and wife were supposed to stay together because they'd made their vows in front of God and family.”

Nicholas Sparks book Safe Haven

Source: Safe Haven

God, Family

“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but though his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Source: 1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance

Education, Suicide, Universe, Time

“A man can spend his whole existence never learning the simple lesson that he has only one life and that if he fails to do what he wants with it, nobody else really cares.--Louis Auchincloss”

Louis Auchincloss (1917–2010) Lawyer, novelist, historian, essayist

Life, Learning

“The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it… try to fake three laughs in an hour -- ha ha ha ha ha -- they'll take you away, man. You can't.”

Lenny Bruce (1925–1966) comedian and social critic

Art, Laughter

“The woman is the home. That's where she used to be, and that's where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home -- will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because the he becomes one of the children.”

Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) French writer and film director

Children, Home, Parting

“A woman shaking in fear from demons in her mind, and the old man who loves her more deeply than life itself, crying softly in the corner, his face in his hands.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

Love, Life, Fear, Cry

“A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

George Bernard Shaw, quoted by Hesketh Pearson, George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality, 1942
1940s and later

“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,”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

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.

Age, Thinking, Reading

“They're puttin' music to AIDS germs--putting a drum machine behind them and a metronome beat and Ted Turner's colorizing them, goddamn it. These aren't even really people, man. It's a CIA plot to make you think malls are good. Don't you see?”

Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian

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."

People, Music, Color, Thinking

“I'm normally not a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me, Superman.

Homer Simpson”

Matt Groening (1954) American cartoonist

“If you want a lover I'll do anything you ask.

If you want a different kind of love I'll wear a mask.

If you want to strike me down in anger here I stand.

If you want a partner in life take my hand.

I'm your man.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

Love, Life, Lovers, Anger

“No man is an island…”

Nick Hornby About a Boy

Source: About a Boy

“People with passion are people who will destroy—for a man's passion is notuntil he proves how much he's willing to sacrifice for it. Will he kill? Will he go to war? Will he break and discard that which he has, all in the name of what he?”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Hero of Ages

War, People, Passion

“This you have to understand. There's only one way to hurt a man who's lost everything. Give him back something broken.”

Stephen R. Donaldson The Wounded Land

Source: The Wounded Land (1980)

Way, Understanding, Hurt

“I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.”

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) French philosopher

Je dirais qu'il faut agir en homme de pensée et penser en homme d'action. <br class="br">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) <br class="br">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."

Thinking