Quotes about man
page 55

“A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

Sense

“I preached as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.”

Richard Baxter (1615–1691) English Puritan church leader, poet, and hymn-writer

Men

“The primitive magician, the medicine man or shaman is not only a sick man, he is above all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself.”

Mircea Eliade book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

Source: Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

“Jacoblike a totally normal young man. He's clearly intelligent. But having his day disrupted probably makes him feel the same way I would if I was suddenly told to bungee off the top of the Sears Tower.”

Jodi Picoult book House Rules

Source: House Rules

Way, Feeling, Intelligence

“For there are two possible reactions to social ostracism - either a man emerges determined to be better, purer, and kindlier or he goes bad, challenges the world and does even worse things. The last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma.”

John Steinbeck book Cannery Row

Source: Cannery Row

World

“Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it’s not clear that he ever really did.”

Elizabeth Kolbert (1961) journalist and author

Source: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Imagination, Nature, Time

“Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

Light

“Little Fly,
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance,
And drink, and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

The Fly, st. 1–3
1790s, Songs of Experience (1794)

Art, Drink, Singing, Dance

“Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

“Don't look now, but there's one man too many in this room, and I think it's you.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

Thinking

“Dilemma of a civilized man; body mobilized but danger obscure.”

Philip K. Dick book The Man in the High Castle

Source: The Man in the High Castle (1962)

“A man can't ride your back unless it's bent”

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

Variant: A man can't ride your back unless it's bent.

“He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world, and every body hoped that he would never come there again.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

World, Hope

“Am I a man? To want you so badly that nothing else matters? To see you, and know I would sacrifice honor or family or life itself to lie wi' you, even though ye'd left me?”

Diana Gabaldon book Voyager

Source: Voyager

Life, Lie, Family

“What is the appropriate reply to make to a man who says he loves you?
Thank you. You are very kind.”

Meg Cabot The Princess Diaries

Source: The Princess Diaries

Love

“A proud heart can survive general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride. It is more difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 3 (p. 27)

Failure, Heart, Motivational, Back To Work

“She has man's brain--a brain that a man should have were he much gifted--and woman's heart. The good God fashioned her for a purpose, believe me when He made that so good combination.”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Source: Dracula

God, Fashion, Heart

“Odd, isn't it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you know, it is a law of love that the so-called 'right' person always comes to soon or too late.”

Lawrence Durrell book Balthazar

Source: Balthazar

Love, Law, Way, Personality

“It's the climbing that makes the man. Getting to the top is an extra reward.”

Robert Lipsyte book The Contender

Source: The Contender

“When I look back on all these worries I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

The Second World War, Volume II : Their Finest Hour (1949) Chapter 8 (September Tensions).
Post-war years (1945–1955)

Life, Deep, Happy

“If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

“The Angel Gabriel disappeared once for sixty years and they found him on earth hiding in the body of a man named Miles Davis.”

Christopher Moore book Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

Source: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

Angels

“if you give a man a fish he'll eat for a day, if you teach a man to fish he'll eat all the fish you may have caught for yourself”

Meg Cabot book Darkest Hour

Source: Darkest Hour

Fish, Wise

“Beware the anger of a patient man.”

James Patterson book Cross

Source: Cross

Anger

“Language most shows a man; speak that I may see thee”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

“Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Life, Fear, Hope, Forgetting

“What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman.”

Charles Bukowski book The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.”

James Boswell book The Life of Samuel Johnson

October 26, 1769, p. 174
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol II
Source: The Life of Samuel Johnson

Time

“Doubt is not always a sign that a man is wrong; it may be a sign that he is thinking.”

Oswald Chambers (1874–1917) British missionary

Thinking

“Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

People, Personality

“A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."”

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) American novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist

A Man Said to the Universe, No. 20
War Is Kind and Other Lines (1899)
Source: War Is Kind and Other Poems

Sense, Universe

“The happiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know that and to wonder at it”

Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–1997) French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and …

Happiness, Bee

“With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

Reading

“I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence (1886)
Source: What Then Must We Do?

“The hitter can never be the judge. Only the receiver of the blow can tell you how hard it was, whether it would kill a man or make a baby just yawn.”

Edward P. Jones The Known World

Source: The Known World

Baby

“Any time your life is at stake and you can't find even one woman to come forward and say, 'This is a good man,' your problem isn't what kind of woman THEY are. Your problem is what kind of men YOU are.”

Pearl Cleage (1948) American novelist

Source: Just Wanna Testify

Life, Men, Problem, Time

“Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll buy a funny hat. Talk to a hungry man about fish, and you're a consultant.”

Scott Adams (1957) cartoonist, writer

Fish

“It is a ridiculous thing for a man not to fly from his own badness, which is indeed possible, but to fly from other men's badness, which is impossible.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

Men, Flying

“I have heard men talk about the blessings of freedom," he said to himself, "but I wish any wise man would teach me what use to make of it now that I have it.”

Walter Scott book Ivanhoe

Source: Ivanhoe

Men, Freedom

“A blind man can see what she feels for you and you for her. Your souls are not merely entwined; they are fused.”

Melina Marchetta Finnikin of the Rock

Source: Finnikin of the Rock

Feeling, Soul

“I have seen sights and travelled in countries you cannot imagine. I have been afraid and I have been in danger, and I have never for one moment thought that I would throw myself at at a man for his help.”

Philippa Gregory book The Queen's Fool

Source: The Queen's Fool

Travel, Imagination, Help, Country

“The moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 160
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Four: Soul and Body

Love, Soul

“Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”

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

Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=807&chapter=88152&layout=html&Itemid=27 (6 January 1816) ME 14:384 <br class="br">1810s <br class="br">Context: If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.

Reading

“His mouth was hot and hungry, and he kissed the way no man should kiss and still be allowed to run free.”

Linda Howard (1950) American writer

Source: Mr. Perfect

Way, Kiss

“For a man to think he can fulfil his destiny without a woman is a misunderstanding, a miscalculation; it is reckless and folly. Certainly a woman is not everthing, but everything depends on her.”

Yasmina Khadra book What the Day Owes the Night

Source: Ce que le jour doit à la nuit

Thinking, Dependency

“I don't think any word can explain a man's life.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Source: Citizen Kane

Life, Thinking

“Can officially confirm that the way to a man's heart these days is not through beauty, food, sex, or alluringness of character, but merely the ability to seem not very interested in him.”

Helen Fielding book Bridget Jones's Diary

Source: Bridget Jones's Diary

Food, Beauty, Sex, Way

“I don't see what women see in other women," I'd told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. "What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man?"
Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, "Tenderness.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Women

“I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Source: Diary and Autobiography of John Adams: Volumes 1-4, Diary (1755-1804) and Autobiography

Reading

“He'd gone from sixteen to seventy-five in a matter of seconds, but the old-man smell happened instantly, like boom. Congratulations! You stink!”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

“I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

Question

“He [Brian Fraser] told me that a man must be responsible for any see he sows, for it's his duty to take care of a woman and protect her. And if I wasna prepared to do that, then I'd no right to burden a woman with the consequences of my own actions.”

Diana Gabaldon book Outlander

Source: Outlander

“It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration,—nay, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.”

Plutarch book Parallel Lives

Of Hearing, 6
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Source: Parallel Lives

“It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Love, Making love, Drink

“I wouldn't destroy an entire house to destroy one man. But I would destroy a man to destroy a house.”

Megan Whalen Turner The King of Attolia

Source: The King of Attolia

Housing

“Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.”

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

Greatness <br class="br">1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Books, Letters and Social Aims http://www.rwe.org/comm/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=5&id=74&Itemid=149 (1876)

Secret, Learning

“Man is able, and has the duty, to reach the furthest point on the road he has chosen. Only by means of hope can we attain what is beyond hope.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Report to Greco

Source: Report to Greco

Hope

“Whoa, what is this? Battle of the Sarcastic and Pissed? Should I make popcorn? Forget American Idol, man. This is much more entertaining. (Kish)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Devil May Cry

Forgetting

“What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.”

William Gaddis book The Recognitions

Source: The Recognitions

“Qui plussait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

“Yes,' growled Fell, 'for animals do not know what they do, but man has knowledge of his cruelty.”

David Clement-Davies book Fell

Source: Fell

Knowledge, Animals

“Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.”

Dan Simmons book The Terror

Source: The Terror

Books, Sense, Indecision

“Everything man does today to be efficient, to fill the hour? It does not satisfy. It only makes him hungry to do more. Man wants to own his existence. But no one owns time. When you are measuring life, you are not living it.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The Time Keeper

Life, Time

“… counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Second Sex

Source: The Second Sex

“It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

‘’It Shall Not Be Forgiven’’
Unspoken Sermons, First Series (1867)
Source: Unspoken Sermons: Series I, II, III

Forgiveness, Passion, Evil, Heart

“And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually… it doesn't matter. Because if God does not exist, then life… every second of it… Is all we have.”

Anne Rice book Interview with the Vampire

Source: Interview with the Vampire

Life, God, Evil

“Tell no man anything, for no man listens
Yet hold thy lips ready to speak.”

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Memory, Forgetting

“First of all, never buy a man a plasma TV until you're married. A lot of men once they have a plasma TV they don't need a girlfriend”

Greg Behrendt (1963) American comedian

Men

“Don't let the man bring you down.”

Maya Angelou book The Heart of a Woman

Source: The Heart of a Woman

“A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent.”

Niccolo Machiavelli book The Prince

Source: The Prince (1513), Ch. 6; translated by Luigi Ricci

Men

“I find myself fascinated by a man who admits to enjoying fairy tales and uses the word "impinge"- barely misses a beat while indulging in a brief girl-on-girl fantasy. You're a man of layers, Ford."
Me and Shrek, we're onions.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Tribute

Girl

“There comes a time in a man's life when he hears the call of the sea. If the man has a brain in his head, he will hang up the phone immediately.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Life, Time, Sea

“So what if man's body evolved from the monkeys? Whether he came from monkeys or fish is unimportant. The important idea is that when the body became "human" enough, the first human soul slipped into it.”

Garth Stein The Art of Racing in the Rain

Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain

Soul, Idea, Fish

“Ocean, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man — who has no gills.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

World, Water

“why do you condemn a man whom you have never met, whom no one knows and about whom even you yourself know nothing?”

Gaston Leroux book The Phantom of the Opera

Source: The Phantom of the Opera

“Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,-Wait and hope.”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Source: The Count of Monte Cristo

Wisdom, God, Hope, Waiting

“He broke the kiss and leaned against her, breathing hard. "Good morning to you, too. Man, I just can't stay mad when you do that.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Midnight Alley

Kiss, Madness

“Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn't trust a man who could git through it cold sober.”

Harry Crews (1935–2012) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Source: Blood and Grits

World

“There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Love, Passion

“My own great-grandfather, who said simply enough, "No wicked man could write such a book as this; and no good man would write it unless it were true and he were commanded of God to do so.”

Jeffrey R. Holland (1940) Mormon leader

God, Books

“I know you've come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

These reportedly, were his last words, to Sergeant Jaime Terán, who in different accounts had either volunteered to be his executioner, or by most accounts, had been selected by lot (9 October 1967). Because of the many different reports that have arisen, much confusion and uncertainty exists about his actual last words. His last words to Colonel Arnaldo Saucedo Parada, head of intelligence of the Eighth Division who delivered the official report on Che's final moments were reported as: "I knew you were going to shoot me; I should never have been taken alive. Tell Fidel that this failure does not mean the end of the revolution, that it will triumph elsewhere. Tell Aleida to forget this, remarry and be happy, and keep the children studying. Ask the soldiers to aim well."
Variant translations:
I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, you are only going to kill a man.
I know you have come to kill me. Shoot, coward. You are only going to kill a man.
Capture and Death (1967)

“Until man is nothing, God can make nothing of him. - Martin Luther”

Dan Brown book Inferno

Source: Inferno

God

“When a man takes a woman for granted, he still looks for reassurance that she is still right there.”

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

“He's a man… and that's no small thing to be.”

Diana Gabaldon book The Fiery Cross

Source: The Fiery Cross

“Do whatever you do intensely. The artist is the man who leaves the crowd and goes pioneering. With him there is an idea which is his life.”

Robert Henri (1865–1929) American painter

Source: The Art Spirit: Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters and Talks to Students, Bearing on the Concept and Technique of Picture Making, the Study of Art

Life, Idea