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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.

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How poor, how rich, how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful, is man!
How passing wonder He, who made him such!

Edward Young

What, if as said, man is a bubble.

Marcus Terentius Varro

His tribe were God Almighty's gentlemen.

John Dryden Absalom and Achitophel (1681)

Let each man think himself an act of God,
His mind a thought, his life a breath of God;
And let each try, by great thoughts and good deeds,
To show the most of Heaven he hath in him.

Philip James Bailey Festus (1839)

Man is about to be an automaton; he is identifiable only in the computer. As a person of worth and creativity, as a being with an infinite potential, he retreats and battles the forces that make him inhuman.

William O. Douglas Points of Rebellion (1970)

Male, n. A member of the unconsidered, or negligible sex. The male of the human race is commonly known (to the female) as Mere Man. The genus has two varieties: good providers and bad providers.

Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

The foremost man of all this world.

William Shakespeare Julius Cæsar (1599)

When I beheld this I sighed, and said within myself, Surely man is a Broomstick!

Jonathan Swift

Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor. Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

Norman Mailer Cannibals and Christians (1966)

Let us not undervalue the dignity of human nature. Man. although fallen, still retains some traces of his primeval glory and excellence — broken columns of a celestial temple, magnificent, even in its ruins.

John McClellan Holmes

What a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty!
In form and moving how express and admirable!
In action how like an angel,
in apprehension how like a god!

William Shakespeare Hamlet (1600)

Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, "Behold Plato's man!"

Diogenes of Sinope

When I die, my epitaph or whatever you call those signs on gravestones is going to read: "I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn't like." I am so proud of that I can hardly wait to die so it can be carved. And when you come to my grave you will find me sitting there, proudly reading it.

Will Rogers The Will Rogers Book (1972)

The precious porcelain of human clay.

Lord Byron

He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

William Shakespeare

Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,—
Now green in youth, now withering on the ground;
Another race the following spring supplies;
They fall successive; and successive rise.

Homer

Forget the brother and resume the man.

Homer

The fool of fate, thy manufacture, man.

Homer

I am an acme of things accomplished, and I am encloser of things to be.

Walt Whitman

Who is wise? He that learns from every One. Who is powerful? He that governs his Passions. Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

Benjamin Franklin

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