quotations about men
They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
Men are like a deck of cards. You'll find the occasional king, but most are jacks.
LAURA SWENSON
attributed, Tweet This Book: The 1,400 Greatest Quotes of All Time in 140 Characters or Less
Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.
ANDRE MALRAUX
attributed, The Executive's Book of Quotations
Any scheme which makes man the head and centre of all things will fail in its applications.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindu, his best friends hear no more of him.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
letter to Maria Gisborne
When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Thus man himself offers sufficient proof of the two orders--Matter and Spirit. In him culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins a universe invisible and infinite.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Men and melons are hard to know.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanack, 1733
Men only disagree
Of Creatures rational, though under hope
Of heavenly Grace; and God proclaiming peace,
Yet live in hatred, enmity, and strife
Among themselves, and levy cruel wars,
Wasting the Earth, each other to destroy:
As if (which might induce us to accord)
Man had not hellish foes enough besides,
That day and night for his destruction wait.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost
Males. You have to lead them to the water and then show them how to slurp it.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Finisher
Men are like performing dogs, they love attention. The second they get less than they think they're entitled to at home, they're off in search of someone else, wagging their tail.
MARSHA
"Why do men cheat?", GQ, July 12, 2017
Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer--and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
AYN RAND
The Virtue of Selfishness
Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.
EDWARD ABBEY
"The Crooked Wood", The Journey Home
Men would make love with any number of women ... even total strangers, while females were selective. They were catering to the demands of one small egg. While males had millions of frantic sperms screaming: "Let us out, let us out!"
WOODY ALLEN
Husbands and Wives
Man is a living lie--a bitter jest
Upon himself--a conscious grain of sand
Lost in a desert of unconsciousness.
HENRY VAN DYKE
"The Grand Canyon"
Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
letter, 1839
A strong man doesn't have to be dominant toward a woman. He doesn't match his strength against a woman weak with love for him. He matches it against the world.
MARILYN MONROE
My Story
Men are like pampered children, that's why women have to be more understanding and responsive to their duties at home.
SHUH
"10 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask a Second Wife", Vice, December 7, 2017
Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Lavinia
Have you never seen a strange unconnected deformed representation of a figure, which seen in another point of view, became proportioned and agreeable? It is the picture of man.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections