Masculinity Quotes

Boys do not long for fathers who will usher them through the gauntlet of psychological disconnect. They long for fathers who have themselves survived intact. Boys do not ache for their father's masculinity. They ache for their fathers' hearts.

T. Real

Certainly, a clear line must be preserved by strict discipline, and on the other hand the men must know that everything is done for them that hard times permit. On the top of that it follows that, among real men, what counts is deeds, not words; and then it comes of itself, when such are the relations between men and their leaders, that instead of opposition there is harmony between them. The leader is merely a clearer expression of the common will and an example of life and death. And there is no science in all this. It is a practical quality, the simple manly commonsense that is native to a sound and vigorous race.

Ernst Jünger

Perhaps I am a rose-picker and a breeze-sniffer.

Sam Wazan

Masculinity is simply a conglomeration of the personality traits necessary for the patriarchal soldier-rapist: physically strong, emotionally cauterized, rational, domineering, cruel. All of this is supposed to add up to "handsome" as well. Likewise femininity is ultimately a description of the personality that results from trauma and powerlessness: weak, passive, yielding, emotional, hyper-vigilant to the needs of the dominators and desperate for the dominator's attention.

Lierre Keith

Don't tell me I'm "too tall" just because my height happens to threaten your rather fragile sense of masculinity. The fact that men cannot look down upon women who are taller than them is the very reason that many men find tall women so intimidating.

Miya Yamanouchi

Kasta looked from one of them to the other, the two of them shaking hands, understanding each other's concern. She didn't see where Giddon came off feeling insulted. She didn't see how Giddon had any place in it at all. Who were they, to take her fight away from her and turn it into some sort of understanding between themselves? She would knock his nose from his face. She would thump them both, and she would apologise to neither.

Kristin Cashore

The problem with the 'masculinity crisis' is not that women have excelled too much and therefore created a crisis for men, but that we have such a stein inability to let go of what it has traditionally meant to be a man...As long as we perpetuate the myth that men have inherent qualities that make them more suitable than women for certain types of work, the shifting nature of the economy (and women's attainment of better jobs) is going to continue to be interpreted as a crisis of masculinity.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

She was so delicate that, while we sat beneath the linden branches, a leaf would fall and drift down and touch her skin, and it would leave a bruise. So as we sat in the afternoon hour, beneath that fragrant linden bower, I had to chase all of the leafs that fell away.

Roman Payne

Women destroy me. I allow them to.

Raquel Cepeda

This was the great difference between disappointing him and disappointing somebody like my mother, or even my aunts. Masculine self-centeredness made him restful to be with.

Alice Munro

The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called “patriotism” and “love of sport.

Sinclair Lewis

... family men, Claude.""Then why aren't they home with their families?""You haven't been listening to me, Claude. It takes lots of honey to raise a family these days..." No, it isn't even that, these teddy bears don't like honey as much as they think they do. They think they're supposed to like it, the way they're supposed to like women and children. They think they're supposed to act like real grizzlies, but they don't feel it. You can't blame them, they just don't have it inside them. What they have, what they love most, is their memories: how the Coach used to shout niceworkpal whenever they caught the big ball or somehow hit the little one, how Dad used to wink when they caught one of his jokes, how when they repeated them he almost died laughing, so they told them and told them - if they told one really well he might do it. They memorized all the conversations verbatim, that about the pussies and the coons, the homers and the balls, the cams and the bearings. They're still memorizing. You can see them almost anytime you're out driving, there in the slow car just ahead, the young man at the wheel, the old man talking, the young man leaning a little to the right in order to hear better, the old man pointing out the properties, the young man looking and listening earnestly, straining to catch the old man's last word, the last joke verbatim, the last bit of know-how about the deals and the properties and the honey. When he thinks he's learned all he can from the old man, he'll shove him out of the car. You watch, next time you're out driving. "...these are the cream, Claude." These are the all-American fairies.

Douglas Woolf

Finding the FatherMy friend, this body offers to carry us for nothing– as the ocean carries logs. So on some days the body wails with its great energy; it smashes up the boulders, lifting small crabs, that flow around the sides.Someone knocks on the door. We do not have time to dress. He wants us to go with him through the blowing and rainy streets, to the dark house.We will go there, the body says, and there find the father whom we have never met, who wandered out in a snowstorm the night we were born, and who then lost his memory, and has lived since longing for his child, whom he saw only once… while he worked as a shoemaker, as a cattle herder in Australia, as a restaurant cook who painted at night.When you light the lamp you will see him. He sits there behind the door… the eyebrows so heavy, the forehead so light… lonely in his whole body, waiting for you.

Robert Bly

Mr. Poyser had no reason to be ashamed of his leg, and suspected that the growing abuse of top-boots and other fashions tending to disguise the nether limbs had their origin in a pitiable degeneracy of the human calf.

George Eliot

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.' (Leviticus 18:22). That means simply that it is foul to do to other men what men habitually, proudly, manfully do to women: use them as inanimate, empty, concave things; fuck them into submission; subordinate them through sex.

Andrea Dworkin

In ancient Greece, adolescence was a time when young men left their biological families to become the lovers of adult men. Sexuality was but one element of an affectional and educational relationship in which youths learned the ways of manhood

Barry D. Adam

Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The altar, as in pre-history, is anywhere you kneel.

Camille Paglia

There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive.

Anaïs Nin

And in most queer communities, regardless of one's sex or identity, people who are more masculine in gender expression are almost always viewed as more valid and attractive than their feminine counterparts.

Julia Serano

This medical view of an ideal male who was insulated from pathogens was inextricably bound up with a parallel discourse about the maintenance of strong ego boundaries, a psychic investment in one’s bodily peripheries that effected a gradual closing (and, one might say, a closing off) of the male body, at once from the outer world of dangerous stimuli and from the inner world of threatening passions. Without a doubt, as Norbert Elias has shown, in the western world both men and women experienced a shift in their sense of personal boundaries during the early modern era where, amid changing social circumstances, rising thresholds of repugnance and shame were manifested among the upper-classes as a growing aversion to their own bodily functions and to the bodies of others. The changes wrought by new developments in table manners and etiquette were extended by the introduction of hygienic practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that endeavored to maximise the order and cleanliness of the social body while futher compartmentalising the bourgeois self as a discrete bodily unit.

Christopher Forth

Masculinity is part of a binary and requires its opposite, since, in the absence of femininity, masculinity would have no meaning.

Sheila Jeffreys

our contemporary ideas about manliness, reflected in action movies and westerns, generally prohibit so-called real men from displaying high emotion, with the exception of anger. John Wayne doesn’t cry. By contrast, Achilles, the epitome of manliness in Homer’s Iliad, weeps openly and at length over the loss of his friend Patroclus.

Thomas Van Nortwick

...at the heart of sexism is the construction of gender polarization, in which femininity and masculinity are assumed to be clearly delineated and any transgression of this pattern warrants punitive measures.

W Anne Joh

Boys often have permission to become men without the forfeiture of their desirability. And so these men write stories that grasp at girls who are ghosts twice over: first by being dead and second by being shallow shadows of actual girls, the assorted fragments of men's aging imaginations rather than the deep and dimensioned creatures that real girls are.

Alana Massey

So Father Ring went off in the lofty mood of a man who has defended a principle at a great sacrifice to himself, but that very night he began to brood and he continued to brood till that sickly looking voluptuary of a ten-shilling note took on all the radiance and charm of a virgin of seventeen.

Frank O'Connor

That's what a man is supposed to do for his wife. Listen, if a nigger didn't get lynched every now and then, well, there's just no telling what they'd do to us.""Who?" Lily asked."Why, honey, the niggers and our husbands both. I don't care what color they are; men build up steam. And they gotta let it out somewhere. Colored men. White men. They both crazy. Honey, the point is you gotta look at it this way: A whole lotta women can't, "I got a man who'll kill for me."

Bebe Moore Campbell

Our culture is now one of masculine triumphalism, in which transhistorically feminine expressions – empathy, sweetness, volubility, warmth – are seen as impediments to a woman’s professional trajectory in many sectors.

Antonella Gambotto-Burke

He scraped through the dark sand to the center house, two stories, both pouring bands of light into the fog. There was warmth and gaiety within, through the downstairs window he could see young people gathered around a piano, their singing mocking the forces abroad on this cruel night. She was there, proptected by happiness and song and the good. He was separated from her only by a sand yard and a dark fence, by a lighted window and by her protectors. He stood there until he was trembling with pity and rage. Then he fled, but his flight was slow as the flight in a dream, impeded by the deep sand and the blurring hands of the fog. He fled from the goodness of that home, and his hatred for Laurel throttled his brain. If she had come back to him, he would not be shut out, an outcast in a strange, cold world.

Dorothy B. Hughes

Indeed, girls can be so in need of social approval that they confuse harassment for acceptance--thinking that any attention is better than none. Since many girls as well as boys buy the idea that sexual aggression and exploitation is normal masculine behavior, it may not even occur to them to demand to be treated as equals.

Leora Tanenbaum

Gone are the days when girls used to cook like their mothers and boys used to dress like their fathers. Now girls drink like their fathers and boys dress like their mothers.

Habeeb Akande

Men need men to keep their edges hot and clean, whereas women keep us warm and soft.

Richard Rohr

Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside.

Richard Rohr

It is a pity that we cannot persuade all ministers to be men, for it is hard to see how other was they can be truly men of God.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

One cannot bring up boys to be eagles and then expect them to be sparrows.

Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt

The key to understnading masculinity is Jesus Christ. Jesus was tough with religious blockheads, false teachers, the proud, and bullies. Jesus was tender with women, children, and those who were suffering or humble. Additionally, Jesus took responsability for Himself. He worked a jon for the first thirty years of His life, swinging a hammer as a carpenter. He also took responsability for us on the cross, where He substituted Himself and died in our place for our sins. My sins are my fault, not Jesus'fault, but Jesus has made them His responsability. This is the essence of the gospel, the "good news". If you understand this, it will change how you view masculinity.

Mark Driscoll

Confession time: I doubt I would ever have picked up one of Marjorie’s books, had I not met her in person. The reason is they’re categorized as Romances, which is where they are shelved in bookstores. Though I have no justification for avoiding it, the romance section is an area in bookstores I seldom wander into. Her novels also have traditional-looking romance book covers, which are occasionally a bit off-putting to us mighty manly men. Then again, who knows? I don’t carry many biases where good storytelling is concerned. I’m willing to find it anywhere, as too many of my friends will attest, when I try to drag them to wonderful movies that they aren’t eager to go to, simply because they fall under the chick-flick rubric. So, in any case, I’m glad I did meet Marjorie Liu in person, because it would have been a shame to miss out on the work of an author this talented due to whatever degree of cultural prejudices I might still possess. I trust you who read this won’t make the same mistake.

Bill Willingham

Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn't afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology.

Neal Stephenson

But many people do not fully realize that there are terrible consequences when people becoming things. Self-image is deeply affected. The self-esteem of girls plummets as they reach adolescence partly because they cannot possibly escape the message that their bodies are objects, and imperfect objects at that. Boys learn that masculinity requires a kind of ruthlessness, even brutality. Violence becomes inevitable.

Jean Kilbourne

It seems almost like America wants their boys hurt. That they need that. That guy who writes books about the wolf and the boy: every book has a scene where the kid gets caught in an avalanche or a freak blizzard. Invariably, the kid winds up naked and alone and bleeding to death and it's only the effort of the wolf that saves him. The boy can never do it himself. If they did that with a female character in a long set of books like that, the feminists would be up in arms. But does anyone mind it when it's a little boy?

J. Warren

He, after all, had no standards of manliness, of virility, to complicate his pride.

Ursula K Le Guin

Could any woman live every day with that level of masculinity?

Larry McMurtry

Manliness consists not in bluff, bravado or loneliness. It consists in daring to do the right thing and facing consequences whether it is in matters social, political or other. It consists in deeds not words.

Mahatma Gandhi

Who can give a man this, his own name?

George MacDonald

In the case of our fair maiden, we have overlooked two very crucial aspects to that myth. On the one hand, none of us ever really believed the sorcerer was real. We thought we could have the maiden without a fight. Honestly, most of us guys thought our biggest battle was asking her out. And second, we have not understood the tower and its relationship to her wound; the damsel is in distress. If masculinity has come under assault, femininity has been brutalized. Eve is the crown of creation, remember? She embodies the exquisite beauty and the exotic mystery of God in a way that nothing else in all creation even comes close to. And so she is the special target of the Evil One; he turns his most vicious malice against her. If he can destroy her or keep her captive, he can ruin the story.

John Eldredge

I could settle for being a man, or I could struggle to become a human being.

Robert Jensen

Stop looking for the path of least resistance and start running down the path of greatest glory to God and good to others, because that's what Jesus, the Real Man, did.

Mark Driscoll

If Jesus looks too feminine to us, maybe it says more about our understanding of masculinity than it does about a possible conspiracy to feminize the church and men.

Nate Pyle

He's a man," Themla said."I guess that explains it.""Hairy, Neanderthalic," Thelma said, "perpetually half-crazed from excessive levels of testosterone, plagued by racial memories of the lost glory of mammoth-hunting expeditions - they're all alike.

Dean Koontz

You become a man not when you reach a certain age, but when you reach a certain state of mind.

Habeeb Akande

By the way, don't 'weep inwardly' and get a sore throat. If you must weep, weep: a good honest howl! I suspect we - and especially, my sex - don't cry enough now-a-days. Aeneas and Hector and Beowulf, Roland and Lancelot blubbered like schoolgirls, so why shouldn't we?

C.S. Lewis

We are turning against boys and forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring of normal, decent males is responsible for much of what is right in the world.

Christina Hoff Sommers

Both spouses are equal, yet different. One of the most beautiful things about a relationship is that the feminine energy can feed a masculine man’s heart. And, the masculine energy can totally light up the feminine energy.

Renee Wade

As for men, they must learn bravery and live for Pleasure and for Beauty. More important than those two things should stand only one thing for him... Honor. A man's honor should be more sacred to him than his life — especially in our age, a time when very few men know what honor is.

Roman Payne

Few men realize how much of their lives are lived in pursuit of the values our culture has traditionally associated with masculinity. These values – a primary focus on work, logical thinking and always being in emotional control – have many benefits to men and their families. When taken to extremes, the pursuit of traditional masculine values becomes a cage for feelings, a stranglehold on life itself.

Mary Crocker Cook

To leave the comforts of home, the mother world, one must have some place to go. Admittedly, the rites of passage of traditional cultures were to initiate the youth into a simpler society, a more homogenous culture than ours. As well, their interest lay not in the individuation of the person but in the integration of the unformed person into the collective definition of tribal masculinity. Still, take away such psychically charged images of identity, take away the wisdom of the elders, take away the community of men, and one has the modern world.

James Hollis

Indeed the very worst kind of man for a women to be in an intimate relationship with, often a truly dangerous man, is the one considered most sexy and desirable in the popular culture.

Jean Kilbourne

Men's pride is situated in their scrotums.

Marjane Satrapi

Of course, thousands of years of traditional masculinity weren't going away without a fight. They lingered in the vestigial memories of men, occasionally challenging a decision to read the directions or wear argyle, hoping for a day when a hurtling piece of space rock will send the world back to a time before the advent of styling gels.

Matt K. Turner

No matter how exotic or seemingly different another man is, there's always some reflection of self in another male.

Jack Donovan

If anything has made men more effeminate in the past half-century, it's been the running feminist critique of masculinity.

Jack Donovan

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Masculinity Quotes

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