The Man Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to The Man. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .
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C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)
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If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4))
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The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
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William Shakespeare (As You Like It)
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The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
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Mark Twain
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A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.
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George R.R. Martin (A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, #5))
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The real lover is the man who can thrill you by kissing your forehead or smiling into your eyes or just staring into space.
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Marilyn Monroe
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Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
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Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx)
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The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
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Mark Twain
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I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.
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Albert Einstein
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Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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Terry Pratchett (Jingo (Discworld, #21; City Watch, #4))
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Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.
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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
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Albert Camus
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The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!
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Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
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I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough..
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Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)
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Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)
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This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.
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William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
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I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naΓ―ve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.
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AnaΓ―s Nin
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Bran thought about it. 'Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?' 'That is the only time a man can be brave,' his father told him.
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George R.R. Martin (A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1))
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Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
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Oscar Wilde
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I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.
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Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
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There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.
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Patrick Rothfuss (The Wise Man’s Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #2))
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Wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure.
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5))
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Kaz leaned back. "What's the easiest way to steal a man's wallet?" "Knife to the throat?" asked Inej. "Gun to the back?" said Jesper. "Poison in his cup?" suggested Nina. "You're all horrible," said Matthias.
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Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1))
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I don't want to be a man," said Jace. "I want to be an angst-ridden teenager who can't confront his own inner demons and takes it out verbally on other people instead." "Well," said Luke, "you're doing a fantastic job.
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Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2))
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A brave man acknowledges the strength of others.
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Veronica Roth (Divergent (Divergent, #1))
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The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
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For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so muchβ€”the wheel, New York, wars and so onβ€”whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than manβ€”for precisely the same reasons.
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Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1))
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You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.
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Brigham Young
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What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul
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Victor Hugo (Les MisΓ©rables)
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Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedomsβ€”to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
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Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.
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Billy Sunday ("Billy" Sunday, the man and his message: with his own words which have won thousands for Christ)
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All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.
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William Shakespeare (As You Like It)
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A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
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C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)
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When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.
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Nelson Mandela
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Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.
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Clive Barker (Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War)
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How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?
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AnaΓ―s Nin
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A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
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Oscar Wilde
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A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
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Oscar Wilde
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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
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Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
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The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
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George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman)
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When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
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Mark Twain
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Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
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Mark Twain
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I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.
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C.S. Lewis
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If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.
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Mark Twain
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The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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George Orwell (Animal Farm)
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The best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.
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William Wordsworth (Lyrical Ballads)
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I am a man" he told her, "and men do not consume pink beverages. Get thee gone woman, and bring me something brown.
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Cassandra Clare (City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3))
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Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.
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Albert Einstein
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One day you will kiss a man you can't breathe without, and find that breath is of little consequence.
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Karen Marie Moning (Bloodfever (Fever, #2))
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Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
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Terry Pratchett (Reaper Man (Discworld, #11; Death, #2))
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Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
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Thomas Merton (No Man Is an Island)
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If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.
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François Mauriac
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I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.
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Oscar Wilde
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Man may have discovered fire, but women discovered how to play with it.
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Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City)
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The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. β€”"Old Man's Advice to Youth: 'Never Lose a Holy Curiosity.'" LIFE Magazine (2 May 1955) p. 64
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Albert Einstein
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When a man gives his opinion, he's a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch.
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Bette Davis
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I don't mind living in a man's world, as long as I can be a woman in it.
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Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words: Marilyn Monroe's Revealing Last Words and Her Photographs)
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It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he'll look for his own answers.
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Patrick Rothfuss (The Wise Man’s Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #2))
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There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life. " Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope.
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Alexandre Dumas
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Albus Severus," Harry said quietly, so that nobody but Ginny could hear, and she was tactful enough to pretend to be waving to Rose, who was now on the train, "you were named for two headmasters of Hogwarts. One of them was a Slytherin and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew.
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7))
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Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.
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Martin Luther King Jr. (A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.)
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There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
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Ernest Hemingway
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If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity β€” only a great man can stand prosperity. It is the glory of Abraham Lincoln that he never abused power only on the side of mercy
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Robert G. Ingersoll
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A woman's heart should be so hidden in God that a man has to seek Him just to find her.
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Max Lucado
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The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them
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Thomas Merton (No Man Is an Island)
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Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.
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Voltaire
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I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.
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Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
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When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
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Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.
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Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
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It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
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Theodore Roosevelt
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Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
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All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.
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Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)
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Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can't figure out what from.
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Mae West
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No woman really wants a man to carry her off; she only wants him to want to do it.
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Elizabeth Peters
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In politics, If you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.
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Margaret Thatcher
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Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money!
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George Carlin
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I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.
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Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell)
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I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.
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Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
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I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.
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John Steinbeck (East of Eden)
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A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
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Irina Dunn
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A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.
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Hunter S. Thompson (The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967)
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I'm a business man," he'd told her. "No more, no less." "You're a thief, Kaz." "Isn't that what I just said?
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Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1))
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Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead)
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Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (A Man Without a Country)
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Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
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Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi (Masnavi i Man'avi, the spiritual couplets of Maula)
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And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (A Man Without a Country)
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If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (A Man Without a Country)
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Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw Jace shoot her a look of white rage - but when she glanced at him, he looked as he always did: easy, confident, slightly bored. "In future, Clarissa," he said, "it might be wise to mention that you already have a man in your bed, to avoid such tedious situations." "You invited him into bed?" Simon demanded, looking shaken. "Ridiculous, isn't it?" said Jace. "We would never have all fit." "I didn't invite him into bed," Clary snapped. "We were just kissing." "Just kissing?" Jace's tone mocked her with its false hurt. "How swiftly you dismiss our love.
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Cassandra Clare (City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1))
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And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (A Man Without a Country)
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It’s probably not just by chance that I’m alone. It would be very hard for a man to live with me, unless he’s terribly strong. And if he’s stronger than I, I’m the one who can’t live with him. … I’m neither smart nor stupid, but I don’t think I’m a run-of-the-mill person. I’ve been in business without being a businesswoman, I’ve loved without being a woman made only for love. The two men I’ve loved, I think, will remember me, on earth or in heaven, because men always remember a woman who caused them concern and uneasiness. I’ve done my best, in regard to people and to life, without precepts, but with a taste for justice.
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Coco Chanel
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Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.
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Margaret Atwood (The Robber Bride)
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Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.
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Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
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He needed to tell her...what? That she was lovely and brave and better than anything he deserved. That he was twisted, crooked, wrong, but not so broken that he couldn't pull himself together into some semblance of a man for her. That without meaning to, he'd begun to lean on her, to look for her, to need her near. He needed to thank her for his new hat.
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Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1))
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I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic β€” on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg β€” or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
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C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)
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This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
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Walt Whitman
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I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W. I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.
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Jane Austen (Persuasion)
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To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.--Soft you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember'd!
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William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
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Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: β€œI like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because β€œI like strong women” is code for β€œI hate strong women.”)
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Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)