Quotes on Men

Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: “I’ll do as I please at everybody else’s expense.” An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man—his own and those of others.

Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha? She had shaken her head slowly. Men and women who can't get over their past . . . That's what ghosts are.

This is how a man looks when he's deciding that the risk of death is better than the risk of change.

Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.

Here’s a question every angry man and woman needs to consider: How long are you going to allow people you don’t even like — people who are no longer in your life, maybe even people who aren’t even alive anymore — to control your life? How long?

The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all. He lives only in what is.

On their deathbed men will speak true, they say.

There was I, devouring books and yet allowing a man who had never read a book to walk me home for a bit of harmless fumbling on the front steps.

He had tenderness in his heart — ‘a soft place,’ as Nicholas Higgins called it; but he had some pride in concealing it; he kept it very sacred and safe, and was jealous of every circumstance that tried to gain admission. But if he dreaded exposure of his tenderness, he was equally desirous that all men should recognize his justice; and he felt that he had been unjust, in giving so scornful a hearing to anyone who had waited, with humble patience, for five hours, to speak to him.

The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them that the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which “God is satisfied," and after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men.

Anna Petrovna (to Shabelsky): You can't make a simple joke without an injection of venom. You are a poisonous man. Joking apart, Count, you're very poisonous. It's hideously boring to live with you. You're always grumpy, complaining, you find everyone bad, good for nothing. Tell me frankly, Count, did you ever speak well of anyone?

Success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women. When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women. When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less.

The gender stereotypes introduced in childhood are reinforced throughout our lives and become self-fulfilling prophesies. Most leadership positions are held by men, so women don't expect to achieve them, and that becomes one of the reasons they don't.

What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?

Life, my dear Watson, is infinitely stranger than fiction; stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We could not conceive the things that are merely commonplace to existence. If we could hover over this great city, remove the roofs, and peep in at the things going on, it would make all fiction, with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions flat, stale and unprofitable.

Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the government take care of him better take a closer look at the American Indian.

Whatever life may be, and whatever horror men have made of it, the world is a lovely place, a magic place, something to marvel over. The world is an amazing place.

Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made (man) is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one... that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain.

One man can be a crucial ingredient on a team, but one man cannot make a team.

There are no brave men and cowardly men in the world, my son. There are only brave men. To be born, to live, to die—that takes courage enough in itself, and more than enough. We are all brave men and we are all afraid, and what the world calls a brave man, he too is brave and afraid like the all rest of us. Only he is brave for five minutes longer.