What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed?
Men Quotes
Little here is prose, and the list is short. Shakespeare leads, then Byron, Pope, Dryden and Josiah Gilbert Holland. Byron’s lines are the best-sourced: sighing that Nature formed but one such man, and broke the die in moulding Sheridan (1816), and the Manfred passage (1817) on men who name themselves sovereigns of the earth yet are half dust, half deity.
The one flagged entry is “The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man,” credited to Madame de Staël and marked disputed.
Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave.
A great man left a watchword that we can well repeat: "There is no indispensable man".
Beloved brother, let us not forget that man can never get away from himself.
God gave man an upright countenance to survey the heavens, and to look upward to the stars.
Ah, how unjust to Nature and himself
Is thoughtless, thankless, inconsistent man!
But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we,
Half dust, half deity, alike unfit
To sink or soar.
The man forget not, though in rags he lies,
And know the mortal through a crown's disguise.
There never was such beauty in another man.
Nature made him, and then broke the mould.
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.