68 Quotes About Men

Exploring the intricate facets of masculinity can be as rewarding as it is enlightening. From celebrated authors and renowned leaders to insightful philosophers and modern thinkers, reflections on what it means to be a man have been shared and debated across cultures and centuries. This collection of the top 68 quotes about men is a testament to the diverse perspectives that shape our understanding of manhood. Whether offering wisdom, humor, or empathy, these quotes invite you to ponder the complexities and joys of being a man and the roles men play in society. Join us on this journey through the words of those who have captured the essence of masculinity in its many forms.

1. “Why does a woman work ten years to change a man, then complain he's not the man she married?” - Barbra Streisand

2. “At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.” - P.G. Wodehouse

3. “Women cannot complain about men anymore until they start getting better taste in them.” - Bill Maher

4. “In politics, If you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.” - Margaret Thatcher

5. “Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.” - Thomas Hardy

6. “Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.” - Erica Jong

7. “I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.""Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.” - Jane Austen

8. “Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.” - Joseph Fort Newton

9. “I'm tired of waiting by the phone, and second-guessing what a guy says and trusting someone not to hurt me. Again. I've been storming the relationship castle for fifteen years, and I still don't have my prince. I've got a bunch of battle scars from the field and I want to go home and nurse my wounds. I don't want to fight anymore.” - Kim Gruenenfelder

10. “I wish to Heaven I was married," she said resentfully as she attacked the yams with loathing. "I'm tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything I want to do. I'm tired of acting like I don't eat more than a bird, and walking when I want to run and saying I feel faint after a waltz, when I could dance for two days and never get tired. I'm tired of saying, 'How wonderful you are!' to fool men who haven't got one-half the sense I've got, and I'm tired of pretending I don't know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they're doing it... I can't eat another bite.” - Margaret Mitchell

11. “I wouldn't want to assume that all men are like you. If I did, I know I would give them up entirely” - Patricia Cornwell

12. “No matter what dimension you're in, there's a big-headed male trying to take over the world.” - Eoin Colfer

13. “men do not suspect faults which they do not commit” - Samuel Johnson

14. “I try to make my comments like a woman's skirt: long enough to be respectable and short enough to be interesting. ” - Adam Clayton Powell

15. “Throughout the course of the day, Bobby Tom's irritation over his artificially oiled and dirt-smeared chest and his unzipped jeans had flared into righteous indignation. They were treating him like a sex object! It was damned demeaning, that's what it was, being reduced to a set of oil pecs and a tight ass. Shit. A dozen years in the NFL, and this was what it had all come down to. Pecs and ass.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

16. “The language of Cat's generation was far harder than that of her own, and more pithily correct: in their terms, he was a hunk. But why, she wondered, should anybody actually want a hunk, when non-hunks were so much more interesting?” - Alexander McCall Smith

17. “Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.” - Jean Rostand

18. “I like men to behave like men. I like them strong and childish.” - Francois Sagan

19. “I require three things in a man: he must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.” - Dorothy Parker

20. “He saw so many emotions mingled on her face: anger disappointment, fear – and defiance. Like her daughter, thought Fenoglio again. So uncompromising, so strong. Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Grief didn’t break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out, very slowly.” - Cornelia Funke

21. “I mean, like most guys, you carry around this girl in your head, who is exactly who you want her to be. The person you think you will love the most. And every girl you are with gets measured against this girl in your head.” - Rachel Cohn

22. “All discarded lovers should be given a second chance, but with somebody else.” - Mae West

23. “It took nearly a year to finish the ever-changing [marriage candidates] list, with the assistance of his sister and his aging spinster aunt, who lorded over their affairs as the self-appointed voice of cultivated reason. During this time, Gabriel struggled to convince straight-from-Oxford Tristan that he must marry, produce heirs, and maintain the family dukedom for Gabriel himself wouldn't marry. He knew he simply did not have the compulsion to inflict that sort of aggravation on a woman.” - Olivia Parker

24. “Women who disapprove of men - and there's plenty to disapprove of - should remember how we started out, and how far we had to travel.” - Nick Hornby

25. “But that's men all over ... Poor dears, they can't help it. They haven't got logical minds.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

26. “Men all do about the same thing when they wake up.” - John Steinbeck

27. “Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can't figure out what from.” - Mae West

28. “Besides we are men, and after all it is our business to risk our lives.” - Alexandre Dumas

29. “What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and, ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.” - Sylvia Plath

30. “Men are as faithful as their options.” - Chris Rock

31. “Emotional neglect lays the groundwork for the emotional numbing that helps boys feel better about being cut off. Eruptions of rage in boys are most often deemed normal, explained by the age-old justification for adolescent patriarchal misbehavior, "Boys will be boys." Patriarchy both creates the rage in boys and then contains it for later use, making it a resource to exploit later on as boys become men. As a national product, this rage can be garnered to further imperialism, hatred and oppression of women and men globally. This rage is needed if boys are to become men willing to travel around the world to fight wars without ever demanding that other ways of solving conflict can be found.” - bell hooks

32. “Often men who have been emotionally neglected and abused as children by dominating mothers bond with assertive women, only to have their childhood feelings of being engulfed surface. While they could not 'smash their mommy' and still receive love, they find that they can engage in intimate violence with partners who respond to their acting out by trying harder to connect with them emotionally, hoping that the love offered in the present will heal the wounds of the past. If only one party in the relationship is working to create love, to create the space of emotional connection, the dominator model remains in place and the relationship just becomes a site for continuous power struggle.” - bell hooks

33. “Visionary feminism is a wise and loving politics. It is rooted in the love of male and female being, refusing to privilege one over the other. The soul of feminist politics is the commitment to ending patriarchal domination of women and men, girls and boys. Love cannot exist in any relationship that is based on domination and coercion. Males cannot love themselves in patriarchal culture if their very self-definition relies on submission to patriarchal rules. When men embrace feminist thinking and practice, which emphasizes the value of mutual growth and self-actualization in all relationships, their emotional well-being will be enhanced. A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving.” - bell hooks

34. “I do like men who come out frankly and own that they are not gods.” - Louisa May Alcott

35. “There is not a man of common sense who would not chuse to be agreeable in company; and yet, strange as it may seem, very few are” - The Town and Country Magazine. vol. 11, 1779

36. “This is where men and women are different, we can put aside petty competition for relationships - they can't. It interferes.” - Adriana Trigiani

37. “Ariel laughed and now her goose bumps had goose bumps.” - Lisa Mantchev

38. “Love lasts a long time but burning desire lasts two to three weeks.” - Carla Bruni

39. “It was ironic, but when you scratched the surface, most successful men were working for one thing only--to retire--and the sooner the better. Whereas women were the complete opposite. She had never heard a woman say she was working so she could retire to a desert island or to live on a boat. It was probably, she thought, because most women didn't think they deserved to do nothing.” - Candace Bushnell

40. “Billy Pilgrim had a theory about diaries.Women were more likely than men to think that their lives had sufficient meaning to require recording on a daily basis. It was not for the most part a God-is-leading-me-on-a-wondrous-journey kind of meaning, but more an I've-gotta-be-me-but-nobody-cares sentimentalism that passed for meaning, and they usually stopped keeping a diary by the time they hit thirty, because by then they didn't want to ponder the meaning of life anymore because it scared the crap out of them.” - Dean Koontz

41. “So, for her, I'll try. I'll trust. I'll ... open myself. I'll ... be this guy I've never been before and don't even known how to be—this goofy "in love" guy, this guy who takes care of his woman, this guy who gives more than he takes.” - Toni Blake

42. “To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one's comrades. It is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

43. “I cannot have a man who is afraid of everything, I don't have the time to soothe insecurities and fears, I cannot have a man who is standing on a stone by a creek, watching for the fish to swim by and every time he sees a fish he says "Oh look, this fish scares me, I wonder what this fish means, this fish might mean- this, or this fish might mean- that" for God's sake, they are just fish, and they don't mean anything! Such a sad thing, so many fine, strong men standing on top of little stones, pointing at fish all the time! Such a waste! Such a waste of time! I can only have a man who will leap into the water, not minding the damn fish and whatever other little things that scare him. I need to have someone who is braver than me; if I am a pirate, he has to be the pirate Captain, if I am a pirate Captain he has to be the flying dragon.” - C. JoyBell C.

44. “Men didn't understand that you couldn't let yourself be consumed with passion when there were so many people needing your attention, when there was so much work to do. Men didn't understand that there was nothing big enough to exempt you from your obligations, which began as soon as the sun rose over the paper company and ended only after you'd finished the day's chores and fell exhausted into sleep against the background noise of I-94.” - Bonnie Jo Campbell

45. “I cant take it like this much longer, Milt," Karen said muffledly into the big CKC shirt with its male smell, allowing herself the luxury of letting the bars all the way down for once, enjoying for just this moment the eternal degradation of being a woman."I cant take it much longer," she whimpered, tasting it, the eternally caught and held hard in the grasp of some man, the forever humiliated heavy weight it was impossible to squirm out from under, the forever helpless except for the mercy of him who always takes what he wants without any, and that all women learn instinctively not to expect [...] That was all they wanted. That was all any of them wanted. You give them the greatest thing you possess, the most intimate secret, and they --- just take it. Well, let them have it. Let them all have some of it. Let them root and rut and rowel, as if it was no more important than that why were they all so anxious to keep it away from each other?” - James Jones

46. “I sort of got off on making bad guys sweat. Which was not unlike my love of making good guys sweat, just by very different means.” - Darynda Jones

47. “...you have been fraternizing with warewolves overmuch! Military men can be terribly bad for one's verbal concatenation!” - Gail Carriger

48. “What is it about men, anyway? You can't live with 'em and the law frowns on neutering them. It's not exactly a win-win situation.” - Susan Andersen

49. “After all, a woman who doesn't love cats is never going to be make a man happy.” - Orhan Pamuk

50. “Oh.My. Every illegal swear word in the dictionary, God. What is it with older men? don't they ever look in the mirror?” - Diane Messidoro

51. “Men tend to remember the best things about the women they've loved and to forget the worst, which is why so many men make the same mistakes with women again and again. Women tend to forget the best things about the men they've loved and to remember the worst, which is why so many women become bitter about men.” - James Carlos Blake

52. “You know how it is - some hot guys don't make your hormones go crazy, while some unattractive guys have massive sex appeal. This guy had it all.” - Sylvia Day

53. “Lots of men think that women should tell the truth, explain their feelings. These men should use their wishes more wisely. (Prepare To Die!, p.27)” - Paul Tobin

54. “...Gentlemen don't understand anything, however wise they may be.” - Georgette Heyer

55. “I rang the bell and she opened the door, dried her hands, and said heartily: 'Hello, stranger. I was just saying to Cliff only tonight, it's about time you showed up around here.' I wanted to detach him from her, but first I had to sit through about ten minutes of her. She was my sister, but you don't tell women things like I wanted to tell him. I don't know why, but you don't. You tell them the things you have under control; the things that you're frightened of, you tell other men if you tell anyone. ("Nightmare")” - Cornell Woolrich

56. “Men are like busses. I mean, you wait for ages and ages, and when one does finally come along you can't get on. And that bit about them coming in threes, well, that's just a myth.” - Eleanor Prescott

57. “He will work off his crudities in time. I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.” - E. M. Forster

58. “Men are all the same. Novelty amongst themselves displeases and upsets them – but if the novelty is wearing a skirt, they go crazy for it.(Les hommes sont tous les mêmes. L'étrangeté leur déplaît, d'homme à homme, et les blesse ; mais si l'étrangeté porte des jupes, ils en raffolent.)” - Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

59. “The manlier you are, the harder it is to understand what a woman wants: there is not a hint of female brain in you.” - Criss Jami

60. “Self-pity, while it should be accorded due respect, is the greatest of all acids to the human soul.” - Paul Hoffman

61. “Feeling sorry for yourself is a universal solvent of salvation.” - Paul Hoffman

62. “The mark of a real man, is a man who can allow himself to fall deeply in love with a woman. But the reason why a man is often heartbroken, is because a woman can become overcome by the reality that she has made a man out of a boy, because it's just such an overwhelming process, a beautiful and powerful evolution. Therefore, a man needs to fall in love with a woman who knows that men don't happen every day, and when a man does happen, that's a gift! A gift not always given, and one that shouldn't be thrown away so easily.” - C. JoyBell C.

63. “I have met so many heartbroken men. It's a catastrophe. Women are easily overcome by the process that happens when a boy falls in love and becomes a man. Men's hearts are so often broken. Still, you have to leave your broken heart in a place where- when the woman who knows how to see what a gift is, sees it- your broken heart can be picked up again. I think that it takes a very strong woman (inner strength) to be able to handle a man falling in love with her, without morphing into a monster (the process is a very potent process, it can poison a woman, really). A woman thinks she wants a man to fall in love with her for all the perks that come with it; but when a real love really does happen, when a real man shows his manhood; it's often too powerful a thing to endure without being poisoned. Hence, all the heartbroken men. But, I do believe that there are strong women in the world today. A few. But there are. You could say, that the mark of a real woman, is a woman who can handle a man- a man falling in love with her. A woman who can recognize that, and keep it with her.” - C. JoyBell C.

64. “I’ve said over and over again jokingly that the only way a woman can truly be completely satisfied is to get herself four different men—an old one, an ugly one, a Mandingo, and a gayguy. Now the four of them combined? They got you covered.” - Steve Harvey

65. “Being female in this world means having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love to hate us. One does does not make choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in body type and behavior and values to become an object of male sexual desire, which requires an abandonment of a wide-ranging capacity for choice... Men too make choices. When will they choose not to despise us?” - Andrea Dworkin

66. “What their scorned, over-fucked mothers never teach them is this: men can be hurt, too.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

67. “Behind every great man is a man greater, his father.” - Habeeb Akande

68. “men are so conceited they’ll believe anything that flatters them” - Margaret Mitchell