This page started my quotes collection and owes a lot to this page at Art of Manliness. AoM is a big inspiration in my life, and Brett McKay a personal hero of mine.
You will find many very different people below. Some of them may believe in or have stood for things you don’t agree with. Some of them are people who believe in or stood for things I don’t agree with either.
But I don’t believe in some puritanical idea that a person’s wisdom is invalidated by beliefs you disagree with, no matter how strongly. Follow that path to it’s end and it is the same as saying that if a person disagrees with you on anything you consider important enough, that person loses their right to speak.
Instead, I believe wisdom can come from many places, and considering the source shouldn’t be the same as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Many people who aren’t perfect have something profound to say. These quotes mean something to me, and I hope they will make you think too.
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I mean to make myself a man, and if I succeed in that, I shall succeed in everything else -James A Garfield
You have to be a man before you can be a gentleman. –John Wayne
Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men. –Norman Mailer
There is a constantly reoccurring notion that real manhood is different from simple anatomical maleness, that it is not a natural condition that comes about spontaneously through biological maturation but rather is a precarious or artificial state that boys must win against powerful odds. This recurrent notion that manhood is problematic, a critical threshold that boys must pass through testing, is found at all levels of sociocultural development regardless of what other alternative roles are recognized. – David Gilmore
We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. –Theodore Roosevelt
Who—only let him be a man and intent upon honor—is not eager for the honorable ordeal and prompt to assume perilous duties? To what energetic man is not idleness a punishment? –Seneca
Private and public life are subject to the same rules—truth and manliness are two qualities that will carry you through this world much better than policy or tact of expediency or other words that were devised to conceal a deviation from a straight line. –Robert E. Lee
Men have discovered their distinctive virtues and vices through grappling with the perennial dilemmas and demands of love, courage, pride, family, and country—the five paths whose proper ordering gives us the key to the secret of happiness for a man. –Waller Newell
We don’t need to reinvent manliness. We only need to will ourselves to wake up from the bad dream of the last few generations and reclaim it, in order to extend and enrich that tradition under the formidable demands of the present. –Waller R. Newell
For the man who makes everything that leads to happiness, or near to it, to depend upon himself, and not upon other men … has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation; this is the man of manly character and of wisdom. –Plato
If unwilling to rise in the morning, say to thyself, ‘I awake to do the work of a man.’ –Marcus Aurelius
Manhood is the defeat of childhood narcissism. –David Gilmore
What a man knows should find its expression in what he does. The value of superior knowledge is chiefly in that it leads to a performing manhood. –Christian Nestell Bovee
“Strength, Courage, Mastery, and Honor are the alpha virtues of men all over the world. They are the fundamental virtues of men because without them, no ‘higher’ virtues can be entertained. You need to be alive to philosophize. You can add to these virtues and you can create rules and moral codes to govern them, but if you remove them from the equation altogether you aren’t just leaving behind the virtues that are specific to men, you are abandoning the virtues that make civilization possible. –Jack Donovan
Manliness means perfect manhood, as womanliness implies perfect womanhood. Manliness is the character of a man as he ought to be, as he was meant to be. –James Freeman Clarke
The amiable is a duty most certainly, but must not be exercised at the expense of any of the virtues. He who seeks to do the amiable always, can only be successful at the frequent expense of his manhood. –W.G. Simms
Here is the manliness of manhood, that a man has a good reason for what he does, and has a will in doing it. –Alexander MacLaren
…the samurai ethic is a political science of the heart, designed to control such discouragement and fatigue in order to avoid showing them to others. It was thought more important to look healthy than to be healthy, and more important to seem bold and daring than to be so. This view of morality, since it is physiologically based on the special vanity peculiar to men, is perhaps the supreme male view of morality.
–Yukio Mishima
A man is one whose body has been trained to be the ready servant of his mind; whose passions are trained to be the servants of his will; who enjoys the beautiful, loves truth, hates wrong, loves to do good, and respects others as himself. –John Ruskin
Isao had never felt that he might want to be a woman. He had never wished for anything else but to be a man, live in a manly way, die a manly death. To be thus a man was to give constant proof of one’s manliness–to be more a man today than yesterday, more a man tomorrow than today. To be a man was to forge ever upward toward the peak of manhood, there to die amid the white snows of that peak. –Yukio Mishima
When men evaluate each other as men, they still look for the same virtues that they’d need to keep the perimeter. Men respond to and admire the qualities that would make men useful and dependable in an emergency. Men have always had a role apart, and they still judge one another according to the demands of that role as a guardian in a gang struggling for survival against encroaching doom. Everything that is specifically about being a man—not merely a person—has to do with that role. – Jack Donovan
It is not the situation which makes the man, but the man who makes the situation. –Frederick William Robertson
The test of every religious, political, or educational system is the man which it forms. –Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Men cannot be men—much less good or heroic men—unless their actions have meaningful consequences to people they truly care about. Strength requires an opposing force, courage requires risk, mastery requires hard work, honor requires accountability to other men. Without these things, we are little more than boys playing at being men, and there is no weekend retreat or mantra or half-assed rite of passage that can change that. A rite of passage must reflect a real change in status and responsibility for it to be anything more than theater. No reimagined manhood of convenience can hold its head high so long as the earth remains the tomb of our ancestors. –Jack Donovan
The search after the great men is the dream of youth and the most serious occupation of manhood. –Ralph Waldo Emerson
Stand true to your calling to be a man. Real women will always be relieved and grateful when men are willing to be men. –Elisabeth Elliott
A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him. –Saul Bellow
The chief constituents of what we call manhood, are moral rather than intellectual. –J. S.Kieffer
There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is ‘Where am I going?’ and the second is ‘Who will go with me?’ If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble. –Sam Keen
A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and it confirmed only by other men. Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all. –Camille Paglia
Adversity toughens manhood, and the characteristic of the good or the great man is not that he has been exempt from the evils of life, but that he has surmounted them. –Patrick Henry
Men of ideas and men of action have much to learn from each other, and the truly great are men of both action and abstraction. –Jack Donovan
It is a grand mistake to think of being great without goodness; and I pronounce it as certain, that there never was yet a truly great man, that was not at the same time truly virtuous. –Benjamin Franklin
History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world have a chance for it. –Walter Bagehot
Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor. –Benjamin Disraeli
“It is very sad for a man to make himself servant to a single thing; his manhood all taken out of him by the hydraulic pressure of excessive business. I should not like to be merely a doctor, a great lawyer, a great minister, a great politician. I should like to be, also, something of a man. –Theodore Parker
The man who is deserving the name is the one whose thoughts and exertions are for others rather than for himself. –Walter Scott
When someone tells a man to be a man, they mean that there is a way to be a man. A man is not just a thing to be—it is also a way to be, a path to follow and a way to walk. Some try to make manhood mean everything. Others believe that it means nothing at all. Being good at being a man can’t mean everything, and it has always meant something. –Jack Donovan
Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one. –Marcus Aurelius
To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. –-Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe. –John Walter Wayland
No man stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child. –Abraham Lincoln
And a man, a man provides. And he does it even when he’s not appreciated, or respected, or even loved. He simply bears up and he does it. Because he’s a man. —Breaking Bad
A man does what he must – in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures – and that is the basis of all human morality. – Winston Churchill
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor. – Norman Mailer
One cannot always be a hero, but one can always be a man. – Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
We need the iron qualities that go with true manhood. We need the positive virtues of resolution, of courage, of indomitable will, of power to do without shirking the rough work that must always be done. – Theodore Roosevelt
The combination of active and contemplative virtues is one of the most enduring themes in three thousand years of experience in what it means to be a man.” – Waller Newell
Show me what kind of man you honor, and I will show you what kind of man you are, for it shows me what you ideal of manhood is, and what kind of man you long to be. – Thomas Carlyle
It is not necessary for a man to be actively bad in order to make a failure in life; simple inaction will accomplish it. Nature has everywhere written her protest against idleness; everything which ceases to be a struggle, which remains inactive, actively deteriorates. It is a struggle toward an ideal, the constant effort to get higher and further, which develops manhood and character. – James Terry White
Duty is the essence of manhood. – George S Patton
We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful. – C. S. Lewis
Personally I hold that a man who deliberately and intelligently takes a pledge and then breaks it, has forfeited his manhood. – Mahatma Ghandi
In the modern techno-industrial culture it is possible to proceed from infancy to senility without ever knowing manhood. – Edward Abbey
First find the man in yourself if you would inspire manliness in others. – Amos Bronson Alcott
Manhood is the social barrier that societies must erect against entropy, human enemies, the forces of nature, time, and all the human weaknesses that endanger group life. -David D. Gilmore
The quintessence of manliness is fearlessness, readiness to defend one’s own pride and that of one’s family. –Julian Pitt-Rivers