"This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth The tender leaves of hope; to-morrow blossoms, And bears his blushing honours thick upon him: The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, And, when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root, And then he falls, as I do."

"What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed?"

"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."

"I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably."

"What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And, yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling, you seem to say so."

"He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again."

"Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love."

"Every actual animal is somewhat dull and somewhat mad. He will at times miss his signals and stare vacantly when he might well act, while at other times he will run off into convulsions and raise a dust in his own brain to no purpose. These imperfections are so human that we should hardly recognise ourselves if we could shake them off altogether. Not to retain any dulness would mean to possess untiring attention and universal interests, thus realising the boast about deeming nothing human alien to us; while to be absolutely without folly would involve perfect self-knowledge and self-control. The intelligent man known to history flourishes within a dullard and holds a lunatic in leash. He is encased in a protective shell of ignorance and insensibility which keeps him from being exhausted and confused by this too complicated world; but that integument blinds him at the same time to many of his nearest and highest interests. He is amused by the antics of the brute dreaming within his breast; he gloats on his passionate reveries, an amusement which sometimes costs him very dear. Thus the best human intelligence is still decidedly barbarous; it fights in heavy armour and keeps a fool at court."

"No notion of primitive man's concept of the external world, his analysis of himself, of the nature of the godhead, etc., is possible unless it be recognized that, as among us, there exist, roughly speaking, two general types of temperament: the man of action and the thinker. ...the man of action predominates overwhelmingly. But this predomination carries with it a far greater significance among primitive people than among us for the very simple reason that the population in any specific group is so small. ...neither the man of action nor the thinker has much understanding of and still less sympathy for the other... The man of action, broadly characterized, is oriented toward the object, interested primarily in practical results, and indifferent to the claims and stirrings of his inner self. ...The thinker ...although he, too, is definitely desirous of practical results ...is nevertheless impelled by his whole nature to spend considerable time in analyzing his subjective states and attaches great importance both to their influence upon his actions and to the explanations ...The former is satisfied that the world exists and that things happen. Explanations are of secondary importance. ...He prefers an explanation in which the purely mechanical relation ...is specifically stressed. His mental rhythm ...is characterized by a demand for endless repetition ...or, at best, of events all of which are of the same general level. Change for him means essentially some abrupt transformation. Monotony holds no terrors for him. ...his mentality is written over the vast majority of myths and magical incantations. ...Now the rhythm of the thinker is quite different. ...He insists on a description couched either in terms of a gradual progress and evolution from one to many and from simple to complex, or on the postulation of a cause and effect relation."

"Surely there came over man a time when he was nothing that could be mentioned. Surely We have created man from sperm mixed (with ovum), to try him, so We have made him hearing, seeing. We have truly shown him the way; he may be thankful or unthankful. Surely we have prepared for the disbelievers chains and shackles and a burning Fire. The righteous truly drink of a cup tempered with camphor"

"Does man think that he will be left aimless (in this life)? Was he not a small life-germ in sperm emitted? Then he was a clot; so He created (him), then made (him) perfect. Then He made of him two kinds, the male and the female. Is not He Powerful to give life to the dead?"

"(God): I have only created Jinns and men, that they may serve Me."

"Surely We offered the Entrusted Mission to the heavens and the earth and the mountains, but they refused to be unfaithful to it and feared from it, and man has turned unfaithful to it. Surely he is ever unjust, ignorant"

"An honest man's the noblest work of God."

"Virtuous and vicious every man must be, Few in the extreme, but all in the degree."

"Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; Still by himself abused and disabused; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled; The glory, jest and riddle of the world!"

"Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man."

"So man, who here seems principal alone, Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal; 'Tis but a part we see, and not a whole."

"that's one of the things that's most encouraging to me: to think that some of these young guys have been listening, and imagining the lives of their daughters in a new way, and thinking about it, and wanting something different for them. That is what some of imagining is about."

"I have to say that war is man-made. It's made by men. It's their thing, it's their world, and they're terribly injured in it. They suffer terribly in it, but it's made by men. How do they come to live this way?"

"Man is no thing, but a drama... Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is... history."

"T'is but a Tent where takes his one day's rest A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest."

"Boys are impulsive. They become mad and they yell. When they are frightened they lash out and they run. When they are sad or their feelings are hurt, they run to a corner and sulk. Grown men don't (or shouldn't) do these things. A man is fully mature when he is able to acknowledge a multitude of intense emotions and then make a decision about how to react to them (if he needs to react to them at all). Sometimes a man will desperately want to yell back, but he doesn't. He has learned self-control, to separate his feelings from his actions."

"But in our Sanazarro 'tis not so, He being pure and tried gold; and any stamp Of grace, to make him current to the world, The duke is pleased to give him, will add honour To the great bestower; for he, though allow'd Companion to his master, still preserves His majesty in full lustre."

"Most men – not just the men in Brentwood – are scared of powerful women with brains. There’s something in a man that makes him want to have power over a woman – whether it’s in the bedroom or because they earn more money. It boosts their egos."

"We all are blind until we see That in the human plan Nothing is worth the making if It does not make the man. Why build these cities glorious If man unbuilded goes? In vain we build the world, unless The builder also grows."

"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."

"No particular man is necessary to the state. We may depend on it that, if we provide the country with popular institutions, those institutions will provide it with great men."

"A man of mark."

"I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character—one that is according to generally accepted principles of classification, by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. ...But, if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I should have fallen under the ban of all the ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I ought to have done so."

"As a natural historian according to the principles of science, up to the present time I have been not been able to discover any character by which man can be distinguished from the ape; for there are somewhere apes which are less hairy than man, erect in position, going just like him on two feet, and recalling the human species by the use they make of their hands and feet, to such an extent, that the less educated travellers have given them out as a kind of man."

"No one has any right to be angry with me, if I think fit to enumerate man among the quadrapeds. Man is neither a stone nor a plant, but an animal, for such is his way of living and moving; nor is he a worm, for then he would have only one foot; nor an insect, for then he would have antennae; nor a fish, for he has no fins; nor a bird, for he has no wings. Therefore, he is a quadraped, had a mouth like that of other quadrapeds, and finally four feet, on two of which he goes, and uses the other two for prehensive purposes."

"There is a great deal of human nature in man."

"Racial and national contentions are not restricted to any particular people or land; we find them in every country.The politician is too near to these... to see them in their proper light; even the historian is not far enough away from them to see them in their right perspective. ...For the anthropologist there are only two well-marked phases in human history. The first phase is that of Natural subsistence—an infinitely long and monotonous chapter, stretching over a million of years or more. The second is the phase of Artificial subsistence—a short chapter covering a period of 10,000 or 12,000 years at the utmost... In the first or long phase mankind was broken into small and scattered groups which gained as best they could a sparse, uncertain, and coarse sustenance from the natural produce of shore and stream, moorland and woodland. In the second or short phase man conquered nature; by means of cultivation and domestication he forced from the soil a sure and abundant supply of food, thus rendering possible the existence of our modern massed populations. ...In that immense first phase of our history an elaborate mental machinery had been evolved for binding small groups of mankind into social units. ...The mental adaptations which modern man has inherited from the immensity of his past we may briefly describe as part of Nature's tribal machinery. ...in our modern racial strifes and national agitations we see man's inherited tribal instincts at war with his present-day conditions of life. We have broken up, or are attempting to break up, Nature's ancient tribal machinery and at the present time are striving to replace her designs by others evolved in the minds of modern statesmen and politicians. ...We cannot understand the nature of our modern racial and national problems until we perceive that in these days we are endeavouring to build a new world out of the wreckage of an old."

"Man has come by his great gifts not by any effort of his own, but... has fallen heir to a fortune for which he has never laboured."

"Where soil is, men grow, Whether to weeds or flowers."

"It does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step."

"Men may rule the world, but women rule the men who rule the world."

"But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated."

"What tho' the spicy breezes Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle; Though every prospect pleases, And only man is vile?"

"Man is a make believe animal—he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part."

"We are coming we, the young men, Strong of heart and millions strong; We shall work where you have trifled, Cleanse the temple, right the wrong, Till the land our fathers visioned Shall be spread before our ken, We are through with politicians; Give us Men! Give us Men!"

"Lords of humankind."

"A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes."

"At all times man approached his surroundings with wide open senses and a fertile intelligence, at all times he made incredible discoveries, at all times we can learn from his ideas."

"I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

"His tribe were God Almighty's gentlemen."

"Man is about to be an automaton; he is identifiable only in the computer. As a person of worth and creativity, as a being with an infinite potential, he retreats and battles the forces that make him inhuman. The dissent we witness is a reaffirmation of faith in man; it is protest against living under rules and prejudices and attitudes that produce the extremes of wealth and poverty and that make us dedicated to the destruction of people through arms, bombs, and gases, and that prepare us to think alike and be submissive objects for the regime of the computer."

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."