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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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Most quoted on men:

You have to stand guard over the development and maintenance of democracy, social justice and the equality of manhood in your own native soil. With faith, discipline and selfless devotion to duty, there is nothing worthwhile that you cannot achieve.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Ye children of man! whose life is a span
Protracted with sorrow from day to day,
Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous,
Sickly, calamitous creatures of clay.

Aristophanes

Man has been lent, not given, to life.

Publilius Syrus

Man may be no very magnificent animal; but he was made for something better than to illustrate a theory.

Gerald Gould

Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart
As I do thee.

William Shakespeare

There is no Theam more plentiful to scan,
Then is the glorious goodly Frame of Man.

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas

I teach you beyond Man [Uebermensch; overman-superman]. Man is something that shall be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him?

Friedrich Nietzsche

"How poor a thing is man!" alas 'tis true,
I'd half forgot it when I chanced on you.

Friedrich Schiller

In a museum in London there is an exhibit called "The Value of Man": a long coffinlike box with lots of compartments where they've put starch—phosphorus—flour—bottles of water and alcohol—and big pieces of gelatin. I am a man like that.

Stéphane Mallarmé

I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, in my opinion. This version of masculinity is a little like having to wear an ill-fitting coat for one's entire life (by contrast, I imagine femininity to be an oppressive sense of nakedness).

Paul Theroux Being a Man (1983)

A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The noble man is only God's image.

Ludwig Tieck

A man is not really a true man until he owns his own home, and they that own their homes are made more honorable and honest and pure, true and economical and careful, by owning the home.

Russell Conwell Acres of Diamonds (1915)

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

'Tis but a Tent where takes his one day's rest
A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest;
The Sultan rises, and the dark Ferrash
Strikes, and prepares it for another Guest.

Omar Khayyám FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859)

The Divine government of the world is like a stream that rolls under us; men are only as bubbles that rise on its surface; some are brighter and larger, and sparkle longer in the sun than others; but all must break; whilst the mighty current rolls on in its wonted majesty!

David Thomas Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Because both man and woman have roles indispensable for life, without them the world cannot endure even a day. Their capabilities are about the same, but men are generally stronger than women. If a strong man fights a woman he will always win.

Fukuzawa Yukichi An Encouragement of Learning (2013)

A self-made man? Yes—and worships his creator.

Henry Clapp

Stood I, O Nature! man alone in thee,
Then were it worth one's while a man to be.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Man seeks, in his manhood,
not orders, not laws and peremptory dogmas,
but counsel from one who is earnest in goodness
and faithful in friendship,
making man free.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Letters and Papers from Prison (1967)

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