Men Quotes (page 274)
This praise, though far from fulsome, gave me pleasure and that is to my shame. But there was something in him, some power of spirit, that made me want to please him. Perhaps, it occurs to me now, it was no more than the intensity of his wish. Men are distinguished by the power of their wanting. What this one wanted became his province and his meal, he governed it and fed on it from the first moment of desire. Besides, with the perversity of our nature, being tested had made me more...
Barry Unsworth
But this practice [vegetarianism], in which youthful love of austerity finds charm, calls for attentions more complicated than those of culinary refinement itself; and it separates us too much from the common run of men in a function which is nearly always public, and in which either friendship or formality presides.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Whenever I hear people talking about "liberal ideas," I am always astounded that men should love to fool themselves with empty sounds. An idea should never be liberal; it must be vigorous, positive, and without loose ends so that it may fulfill its divine mission and be productive. The proper place for liberality is in the realm of the emotions.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Today we ought to add to these terms the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy or the rule by an intricate system of bureaux in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many can be held responsible and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody.
Hannah Arendt
Two chubby, expressionless boys stand to my right. They were once cute children, but now I imagine that they spend hours in dark rooms looking at violent porn. Or perhaps they have tender reveries about being sweet to the girls that they adore from a distance. I'd like to think about them in a generous light -- that they are actually gentle young men -- but it's hard not to stereotype them as potential serial killers. It's their eerie, still blankness that makes me think they're capable of...
Dave Eggers
To such men the desperate and horrible thought has come that perhaps the whole of human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated abortion of the primal mother, a savage and dismal catastrophe of nature. To them, too, however, the other thought has come that man is perhaps not merely a half-rational animal but a child of the gods and destined to immortality.
Herman Hesse